Studia Patristica - Papers Presented at the Eighteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford 2019: Ordo Amoris in Augustine (13) (Studia Patristica, 116) 9789042943230, 9789042943247, 9042943238

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STUDIA PATRISTICA VOL. CXVI

Papers presented at the Eighteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 2019 Edited by MARKUS VINZENT Volume 13:

Ordo Amoris in Augustine Edited by PAUL CAMACHO and IAN CLAUSEN

PEETERS LEUVEN – PARIS – BRISTOL, CT

2021

STUDIA PATRISTICA VOL. CXVI

STUDIA PATRISTICA Editor: Markus VINZENT, King’s College London, UK and Max Weber Centre, University of Erfurt, Germany

Board of Directors (2019): Carol HARRISON, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford, UK Mark EDWARDS, Professor of Early Christian Studies, Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford, UK Neil MCLYNN, University Lecturer in Later Roman History, Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford, UK Philip BOOTH, A.G. Leventis Associate Professor in Eastern Christianity, Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford, UK Sophie LUNN-ROCKLIFFE, Lecturer in Patristics, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, UK Morwenna LUDLOW, Professor, Theology and Religion, University of Exeter, UK Ioannis PAPADOGIANNAKIS, Senior Lecturer in Patristics, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London, UK Markus VINZENT, Professor of the History of Theology, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London, UK Josef LÖSSL, Professor of Historical Theology and Intellectual History, School of History, Archaeology and Religion, Cardiff University, UK Lewis AYRES, Professor of Catholic and Historical Theology, Department of Theology and Religion, Durham University, UK John BEHR, Regius Chair in Humanity, The School of Divinity, History, Philosophy & Art History, University of Aberdeen, UK Anthony DUPONT, Research Professor in Christian Antiquity, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven, Belgium Patricia CINER (as president of AIEP), Professor, Universidad de San Juan-Universidad Católica de Cuyo, Argentina Clayton JEFFORD (as president of NAPS), Professor of Scripture, Seminary and School of Theology, Saint Meinrad, IN, USA

STUDIA PATRISTICA VOL. CXVI

Papers presented at the Eighteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 2019 Edited by MARKUS VINZENT Volume 13:

Ordo Amoris in Augustine Edited by PAUL CAMACHO and IAN CLAUSEN

PEETERS LEUVEN – PARIS – BRISTOL, CT

2021

© Peeters Publishers — Louvain — Belgium 2021 All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form. D/2021/0602/150 ISBN: 978-90-429-4323-0 eISBN: 978-90-429-4324-7 A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Printed in Belgium by Peeters, Leuven

Table of Contents Paul CAMACHO – Ian CLAUSEN Introduction .........................................................................................

1

Renée KÖHLER-RYAN Augustine Pulling and Stretching: Responding to Charles Taylor’s Account of Interior Order ...................................................................

5

Erika KIDD Grief, Memory, and the Order of Love...............................................

19

Hubertus R. DROBNER Love and Fear – Antitheses and Interdependent Complements .........

27

Ian CLAUSEN Hope and Conscience in Augustine’s Order of Love .........................

37

Allan FITZGERALD The Formation of Conscience in Augustine and Today .....................

45

Michelle FALCETANO Teaching as a Form of Storytelling in De Magistro, Storytelling as a Form of Teaching in Confessiones ..................................................

61

David Vincent MECONI Lest Loves Compete: Saint Augustine’s Theology of Charity...........

75

Sarah STEWART-KROEKER Love of and for the Martyrs: Resurrected Wounds and the ‘Order’ of Restoration ......................................................................................

91

Terence SWEENEY Monica between the Two Cities: The Place of Conversion in the Thought of Augustine..........................................................................

99

Veronica ROBERTS OGLE Politics and the Parodic City: Augustine’s Sacramental Vision and its Institutional Implications................................................................

113

Abbreviations AA.SS AAWG.PH AB AC ACL ACO ACW AHDLMA AJAH AJP AKK AKPAW ALMA ALW AnalBoll ANCL ANF ANRW AnSt AnThA APOT AR ARW ASS AThANT Aug AugSt AW AZ BA BAC BASOR BDAG BEHE BETL BGL BHG BHL

see ASS. Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen Philologisch-historische Klasse, Göttingen. Analecta Bollandiana, Brussels. Antike und Christentum, ed. F.J. Dölger, Münster. Antiquité classique, Louvain. Acta conciliorum oecumenicorum, ed. E. Schwartz, Berlin. Ancient Christian Writers, ed. J. Quasten and J.C. Plumpe, Westminster (Md.)/London. Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge, Paris. American Journal of Ancient History, Cambridge, Mass. American Journal of Philology, Baltimore. Archiv für katholisches Kirchenrecht, Mainz. Abhandlungen der königlichen Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin. Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi (Bulletin du Cange), Paris/Brussels. Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft, Regensburg. Analecta Bollandiana, Brussels. Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Edinburgh. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Buffalo/New York. Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, ed H. Temporini et al., Berlin. Anatolian Studies, London. Année théologique augustinienne, Paris. Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, ed. R.E. Charles, Oxford. Archivum Romanicum, Florence. Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, Berlin/Leipzig. Acta Sanctorum, ed. the Bollandists, Brussels. Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments, Zürich. Augustinianum, Rome. Augustinian Studies, Villanova (USA). Athanasius Werke, ed. H.-G. Opitz et al., Berlin. Archäologische Zeitung, Berlin. Bibliothèque augustinienne, Paris. Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, Madrid. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, New Haven, Conn. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd edn F.W. Danker, Chicago. Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, Paris. Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, Louvain. Benediktinisches Geistesleben, St. Ottilien. Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, Brussels. Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina Antiquae et Mediae Aetatis, Brussels.

VIII BHO BHTh BJ BJRULM BKV BKV2 BKV3 BLE BoJ BS BSL BWAT Byz BZ BZNW CAr CBQ CChr.CM CChr.SA CChr.SG CChr.SL CH CIL CP(h) CPG CPL CQ CR CSCO

CSEL CSHB CTh CUF CW DAC

Abbreviations

Bibliotheca Hagiographica Orientalis, Brussels. Beiträge zur historischen Theologie, Tübingen. Bursians Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, Leipzig. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Manchester. Bibliothek der Kirchenväter, ed. F.X. Reithmayr and V. Thalhofer, Kempten. Bibliothek der Kirchenväter, ed. O. Bardenhewer, Th. Schermann, and C. Weyman, Kempten/Munich. Bibliothek der Kirchenväter. Zweite Reihe, ed. O. Bardenhewer, J. Zellinger, and J. Martin, Munich. Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique, Toulouse. Bonner Jahrbücher, Bonn. Bibliotheca sacra, London. Bolletino di studi latini, Naples. Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten Testament, Leipzig/Stuttgart. Byzantion, Leuven. Byzantinische Zeitschrift, Leipzig. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft, Berlin. Cahiers Archéologique, Paris. Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Washington. Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis, Turnhout/Paris. Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum, Turnhout/Paris. Corpus Christianorum, Series Graeca, Turnhout/Paris. Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, Turnhout/Paris. Church History, Chicago. Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, Berlin. Classical Philology, Chicago. Clavis Patrum Graecorum, ed. M. Geerard, vols. I-VI, Turnhout. Clavis Patrum Latinorum (SE 3), ed. E. Dekkers and A. Gaar, Turnhout. Classical Quarterly, London/Oxford. The Classical Review, London/Oxford. Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, Louvain. Aeth = Scriptores Aethiopici Ar = Scriptores Arabici Arm = Scriptores Armeniaci Copt = Scriptores Coptici Iber = Scriptores Iberici Syr = Scriptores Syri Subs = Subsidia Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vienna. Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, Bonn. Collectanea Theologica, Lvov. Collection des Universités de France publiée sous le patronage de l’Association Guillaume Budé, Paris. Catholic World, New York. Dictionary of the Apostolic Church, ed. J. Hastings, Edinburgh.

Abbreviations

DACL DAL DB DBS DCB DHGE Did DOP DOS DR DS DSp DTC EA ECatt ECQ EE EECh EKK EH EO EtByz ETL EWNT ExpT FC FGH FKDG FRL FS FThSt FTS FZThPh GCS GDV GLNT GNO GRBS

IX

see DAL Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, ed. F. Cabrol, H. Leclercq, Paris. Dictionnaire de la Bible, Paris. Dictionnaire de la Bible, Supplément, Paris. Dictionary of Christian Biography, Literature, Sects, and Doctrines, ed. W. Smith and H. Wace, 4 vols, London. Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastique, ed. A. Baudrillart, Paris. Didaskalia, Lisbon. Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Cambridge, Mass., subsequently Washington, D.C. Dumbarton Oaks Studies, Cambridge, Mass., subsequently Washington, D.C. Downside Review, Stratton on the Fosse, Bath. H.J. Denzinger and A. Schönmetzer, ed., Enchiridion Symbolorum, Barcelona/Freiburg i.B./Rome. Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, ed. M. Viller, S.J., and others, Paris. Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, ed. A. Vacant, E. Mangenot, and E. Amann, Paris. Études augustiniennes, Paris. Enciclopedia Cattolica, Rome. Eastern Churches Quarterly, Ramsgate. Estudios eclesiasticos, Madrid. Encyclopedia of the Early Church, ed. A. Di Berardino, Cambridge. Evangelisch-Katholischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament, Neukirchen. Enchiridion Fontium Historiae Ecclesiasticae Antiquae, ed. Ueding-Kirch, 6th ed., Barcelona. Échos d’Orient, Paris. Études Byzantines, Paris. Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses, Louvain. Exegetisches Wörterbuch zum NT, ed. H.R. Balz et al., Stuttgart. The Expository Times, Edinburgh. The Fathers of the Church, New York. Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, Berlin. Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte, Göttingen. Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments, Göttingen. Festschrift. Freiburger theologische Studien, Freiburg i.B. Frankfurter theologische Studien, Frankfurt a.M. Freiburger Zeitschrift für Theologie und Philosophie, Freiburg/Switzerland. Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller, Leipzig/Berlin. Geschichtsschreiber der deutschen Vorzeit, Stuttgart. Grande Lessico del Nuovo Testamento, Genoa. Gregorii Nysseni Opera, Leiden. Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, Cambridge, Mass.

X GWV HbNT HDR HJG HKG HNT HO HSCP HTR HTS HZ ICC ILCV ILS J(b)AC JBL JdI JECS JEH JJS JLH JPTh JQR JRS JSJ JSOR JTS KAV KeTh KJ(b) LCL LNPF L(O)F LSJ LThK LXX MA MAMA Mansi MBTh

Abbreviations

Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, Offenburg. Handbuch zum Neuen Testament. Tübingen. Harvard Dissertations in Religion, Missoula. Historisches Jahrbuch der Görresgesellschaft, successively Munich, Cologne and Munich/Freiburg i.B. Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte, Tübingen. Handbuch zum Neuen Testament, Tübingen. Handbuch der Orientalistik, Leiden. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Cambridge, Mass. Harvard Theological Review, Cambridge, Mass. Harvard Theological Studies, Cambridge, Mass. Historische Zeitschrift, Munich/Berlin. The International Critical Commentary of the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, Edinburgh. Inscriptiones Latinae Christianae Veteres, ed. E. Diehl, Berlin. Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae, ed. H. Dessau, Berlin. Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum, Münster. Journal of Biblical Literature, Philadelphia, Pa., then various places. Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Berlin. Journal of Early Christian Studies, Baltimore. The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, London. Journal of Jewish Studies, London. Jahrbuch für Liturgik und Hymnologie, Kassel. Jahrbücher für protestantische Theologie, Leipzig/Freiburg i.B. Jewish Quarterly Review, Philadelphia. Journal of Roman Studies, London. Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period, Leiden. Journal of the Society of Oriental Research, Chicago. Journal of Theological Studies, Oxford. Kommentar zu den apostolischen Vätern, Göttingen. Kerk en Theologie, ’s Gravenhage. Kirchliches Jahrbuch für die evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, Gütersloh. The Loeb Classical Library, London/Cambridge, Mass. A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. P. Schaff and H. Wace, Buffalo/New York. Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, Oxford. H.G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, new (9th) edn H.S. Jones, Oxford. Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, Freiburg i.B. Septuagint. Moyen-Âge, Brussels. Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua, London. J.D. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, Florence, 1759-1798. Reprint and continuation: Paris/Leipzig, 1901-1927. Münsterische Beiträge zur Theologie, Münster.

Abbreviations

MCom MGH ML MPG MSR MThZ Mus NA28 NGWG NH(M)S NIV NKJV NovTest NPNF NRSV NRTh NTA NT.S NTS NTTSD OBO OCA OCP OECS OLA OLP Or OrChr OrSyr PG PGL PL PLRE PLS PO PRE PS PTA PThR PTS PW QLP QuLi RAC RACh

XI

Miscelanea Comillas, Comillas/Santander. Monumenta germaniae historica. Hanover/Berlin. Mediaevalia Lovaniensia, Louvain. See PG. Mélanges de science religieuse, Lille. Münchener theologische Zeitschrift, Munich. Le Muséon, Louvain. Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th edition, Stuttgart. Nachrichten der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Nag Hammadi (and Manichaean) Studies, Leiden. New International Version. New King James Version. Novum Testamentum, Leiden. See LNPF. New Revised Standard Version. Nouvelle Revue Théologique, Tournai/Louvain/Paris. Neutestamentliche Abhandlungen, Münster. Novum Testamentum Supplements, Leiden. New Testament Studies, Cambridge/Washington. New Testament Tools, Studies and Documents, Leiden/Boston. Orbis biblicus et orientalis, Freiburg, Switz., then Louvain. Orientalia Christiana Analecta, Rome. Orientalia Christiana Periodica, Rome. Oxford Early Christian Studies, Oxford. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, Louvain. Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica, Louvain. Orientalia. Commentarii editi a Pontificio Instituto Biblico, Rome. Oriens Christianus, Leipzig, then Wiesbaden. L’Orient Syrien, Paris. Migne, Patrologia, series graeca. A Patristic Greek Lexicon, ed. G.L. Lampe, Oxford. Migne, Patrologia, series latina. The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, ed. A.H.M. Jones et al., Cambridge. Migne, Patrologia, series latina. Supplementum ed. A. Hamman. Patrologia Orientalis, Paris. Paulys Realenzyklopädie der classischen Alterthumswissenschaft, Stuttgart. Patrologia Syriaca, Paris. Papyrologische Texte und Abhandlungen, Bonn. Princeton Theological Review, Princeton. Patristische Texte und Studien, Berlin. Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, ed. G. Wissowa, Stuttgart. Questions liturgiques et paroissiales, Louvain. Questions liturgiques, Louvain. Rivista di Archeologia Cristiana, Rome. Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, Stuttgart.

XII RAM RAug RBen RB(ibl) RE

Abbreviations

Revue d’ascétique et de mystique, Paris. Recherches Augustiniennes, Paris. Revue Bénédictine, Maredsous. Revue biblique, Paris. Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, founded by J.J. Herzog, 3e ed. A. Hauck, Leipzig. REA(ug) Revue des études Augustiniennes, Paris. REB Revue des études byzantines, Paris. RED Rerum ecclesiasticarum documenta, Rome. RÉL Revue des études latines, Paris. REG Revue des études grecques, Paris. RevSR Revue des sciences religieuses, Strasbourg. RevThom Revue thomiste, Toulouse. RFIC Rivista di filologia e d’istruzione classica, Turin. RGG Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Gunkel-Zscharnack, Tübingen RHE Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, Louvain. RhMus Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, Bonn. RHR Revue de l’histoire des religions, Paris. RHT Revue d’Histoire des Textes, Paris. RMAL Revue du Moyen-Âge Latin, Paris. ROC Revue de l’Orient chrétien, Paris. RPh Revue de philologie, Paris. RQ Römische Quartalschrift, Freiburg i.B. RQH Revue des questions historiques, Paris. RSLR Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa, Florence. RSPT, RSPh Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, Paris. RSR Recherches de science religieuse, Paris. RTAM Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, Louvain. RthL Revue théologique de Louvain, Louvain. RTM Rivista di teologia morale, Bologna. Sal Salesianum, Roma. SBA Schweizerische Beiträge zur Altertumswissenschaft, Basel. SBS Stuttgarter Bibelstudien, Stuttgart. ScEc Sciences ecclésiastiques, Bruges. SCh, SC Sources chrétiennes, Paris. SD Studies and Documents, ed. K. Lake and S. Lake. London/Philadelphia. SE Sacris Erudiri, Bruges. SDHI Studia et documenta historiae et iuris, Roma. SH Subsidia Hagiographica, Brussels. SHA Scriptores Historiae Augustae. SJMS Speculum. Journal of Mediaeval Studies, Cambridge, Mass. SM Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweige, Munich. SO Symbolae Osloenses, Oslo. SP Studia Patristica, successively Berlin, Kalamazoo, Leuven. SPM Stromata Patristica et Mediaevalia, ed. C. Mohrmann and J. Quasten, Utrecht.

Abbreviations

SQ SQAW SSL StudMed SVigChr SVF TDNT TE ThGl ThJ ThLZ ThPh ThQ ThR ThWAT ThWNT ThZ TLG TP TRE TS TThZ TU USQR VC VetChr VT WBC WUNT WZKM YUP ZAC ZAM ZAW ZDPV ZKG ZKTh ZNW ZRG ZThK

XIII

Sammlung ausgewählter Quellenschriften zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte, Tübingen. Schriften und Quellen der Alten Welt, Berlin. Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, Louvain. Studi Medievali, Turin. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, Leiden. Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, ed. J. von Arnim, Leipzig. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Grand Rapids, Mich. Teologia espiritual, Valencia. Theologie und Glaube, Paderborn. Theologische Jahrbücher, Leipzig. Theologische Literaturzeitung, Leipzig. Theologie und Philosophie, Freiburg i.B. Theologische Quartalschrift, Tübingen. Theologische Rundschau, Tübingen. Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Alten Testament, Stuttgart. Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, Stuttgart. Theologische Zeitschrift, Basel. Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Lancaster, Pa. Theologische Realenzyklopädie, Berlin. Theological Studies, New York and various places; now Washington, DC. Trierer theologische Zeitschrift, Trier. Texte und Untersuchungen, Leipzig/Berlin. Union Seminary Quarterly Review, New York. Vigiliae Christianae, Amsterdam. Vetera Christianorum, Bari (Italy). Vetus Testamentum, Leiden. Word Biblical Commentary, Waco. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, Tübingen. Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, Vienna. Yale University Press, New Haven. Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, Berlin. Zeitschrift für Aszese und Mystik, Innsbruck, then Würzburg. Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, Giessen, then Berlin. Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins, Leipzig. Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, Gotha, then Stuttgart. Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie, Vienna. Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche, Giessen, then Berlin. Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte, Weimar. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, Tübingen.

Introduction Paul CAMACHO, Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA Ian CLAUSEN, Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA

The ten papers gathered here originated as presentations for a workshop designed to examine the complex interplay of Augustine’s concept of the ‘order of love’ (ordo amoris). This workshop, which took place at the 18th International Conference on Patristic Studies at Oxford University in August 2019, brought together a group of international scholars of both junior and senior rank. As with a previous (and complementary) volume on Augustine (‘Latreia and Idolatry: Augustine and the Quest for Right Relationship’, ed. Paul Camacho and Veronica Roberts, Vol. 14 in the Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Patristic Studies, Studia Patristica Vol. LXXXVIII [Leuven, 2017]), the current volume represents an ongoing effort to coordinate a diversity of perspectives, methods, and questions across disciplinary boundaries in order to explore a central idea in the ‘corpus Augustinianum’. In particular, the gathered essays aim to chronicle Augustine’s contribution to the enduring task of bringing order to human relations by means of a developed theology and philosophy of love. Broadly speaking, the following papers can be classified according to four distinct, interlocking contexts in which the ordo amoris appears for Augustine: (1) ordering love in the person, (2) ordering love among persons, (3) ordering love to God, and (4) ordering love in the political community. (1) Ordering love in the person. Renée Köhler-Ryan opens the volume with a reconsideration of the claim – put forward by Charles Taylor in his influential Sources of the Self (1989) – that Augustine ‘invents’ a proto-Cartesian interiority. Through a re-reading of Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos 145, Köhler-Ryan argues instead that Augustine’s ordo amoris integrates both the exterior and the interior person in a ‘porous’ stretching of the self toward God. Erika Kidd dramatizes this insight by showing the ways in which Augustine’s notion of ordering love concerns not primarily a forwardlooking moral imperative, but rather an exercise of the memory in which one begins to re-evaluate one’s relationship to the objects of one’s love (or failure to love). She shows in particular how the soul is granted healing and rest from grief through a retrospective ordering of the heart. Hubertus R. Drobner continues to probe the emotional landscape of Augustine’s thought, examining the relationship between love and fear in Augustine’s scriptural exegesis. It becomes clear that Augustine does not oppose these two phenomena, but rather considers love and fear to be interdependent emotions within a more comprehensive order of love.

Studia Patristica CXVI, 1-3. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

2

P. CAMACHO – I. CLAUSEN

(2) Ordering love among persons. Ian Clausen moves us from a consideration of the inner person to draw our attention to the ‘social’ dimension of Augustine’s thought. Arguing that the virtue of hope is inextricably linked, for Augustine, to the notion of conscience – and, importantly, that conscience for Augustine always involves attention to the world and to others as they truly are (as opposed to how we wish or fantasize that they ought to be) – Clausen suggests that a proper understanding of Augustinian hope must involve the conscientious ordering of love among real communities of pilgrim individuals. Allan Fitzgerald develops the role and meaning of conscience in Augustine’s thought, extending the argument that for Augustine conscience is not a ‘private’ matter but rather a ‘communal’ endeavor. In particular, conscience is formed and developed through the specific activity of loving one’s neighbor, a challenging way of living that Augustine articulated especially in his commentary on the first letter of John which was addressed to Catholics and Donatists alike. Michelle Falcetano ratifies the Augustinian emphasis upon community in her exploration of the relationship between teaching and storytelling. She argues that, when one allows the pedagogical principles of the De Magistro to inform the way in which we read the stories of the Confessiones, what emerges is an articulation of learning as an intersubjective literary project which turns decisively upon our communal narration of particular loves. (3) Ordering love to God. The ultimate goal of all attempts at ordering human relations is the ordering of individual and communal loves toward God. David Meconi outlines the theological shape of love by reflecting upon Augustine’s well-known inversion of the Johannine claim that God is love. Meconi shows that, if, as Augustine claims, ‘love is God’, then it follows that love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable: love is not ordered by subordinating the love of neighbor to the love of God; rather, true love of neighbor consists precisely in the convergence of Christian virtue and God, a convergence in which created persons are bound together into a deifying union with God and each other. Sarah Stewart-Kroeker reflects this very principle in her focus upon the particular way in which such an understanding of love alters the significance of the wounds of the martyrs in the eschaton. Augustine’s affirmation that both Christ and the martyrs will possess resurrected bodies without deformity and yet with the wounds of martyrdom illustrates the power of Christ’s love (both in himself and in the community of believers) to re-order earthly desire so as to see a particular form of deified beauty in the wounds of martyrdom. (4) Ordering love in the political community. The seeming unavoidability of woundedness among members of the human family calls to mind the demanding and difficult complexities of ordering political communities. Terrence Sweeney makes the surprising connection between Augustine’s

Introduction

3

depiction of Monica in the Confessiones and the potential for a non-violent ethic of peace such as we find articulated in the anti-Imperial political vision of De ciuitate Dei. He argues that we can understand Monica’s conversion of Patricius as a strategic subversion of submission, one in which the relationship predicated on dominance, violence, and lust (Patricius as Roman) is converted instead into a relationship based on peace (Patricius as Christian convert). Veronica Roberts then concludes the volume with an argument which seeks to re-contextualize Augustine’s political thought within the natural social order. What Augustine has to teach us is that politics must be located within the shared life of a political community. Therefore, Roberts Ogle argues, the ordering of loves in the political order is not simply a concession to a post-lapsarian anthropology. On the contrary, understanding politics as natural allows for the possibility of critiquing coercive political institutions as sinful.

Augustine Pulling and Stretching: Responding to Charles Taylor’s Account of Interior Order Renée KÖHLER-RYAN, University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney, Australia

ABSTRACT Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity claims a strange place for Augustine, where the saint invents Cartesian interiority. However, Taylor’s analysis depends too much on Etienne Gilson’s interpretation of Augustine, which over-emphasises the role of the ‘interior self’ at the expense of the whole person. Carol Harrison, John C. Cavadini and William Desmond all provide ways to counter Taylor’s claims about the importance of the interior to the detriment of the exterior. Their ideas cast light on a fresh reading of Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos 145, which Gilson deliberately mistranslates so that it accords with his own interpretation of interiority in Augustine. The paper is thus a retrieval, from Gilson and Taylor, of a self that constantly pulls together body and soul, in order to stretch out as far as possible toward God. It proceeds by explaining Taylor’s interpretation of Augustine and the main source that he uses, which is Gilson’s The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine. Then it discusses Harrison, Cavadini and Desmond, particularly for their ideas of incarnate beauty, the enigma of selfhood, and porosity. Finally, it discusses Enarrationes in Psalmos 145, on whose mistranslation Taylor depends.

In 1989, Charles Taylor published his highly influential genealogy of modernity: Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity.1 Thirty years later, it may be time to reassess some of his assumptions. This paper calls into question, in particular, Taylor’s reading of Augustine, which is situated within a narrative that leaps from Plato to Augustine to Descartes, glossing over neoPlatonism and skipping the medieval era up to the point of late scholasticism. Drawing such tight links between Plato, Augustine, and Descartes has tended to skew readings of Augustine that rely heavily on Taylor. Namely, Taylor’s reading presupposes and then supports the idea that Augustine has a sense of self that is entirely interior; and that this interiority is an unchanging central space. This idea of selfhood, Taylor argues, was a direct influence on Descartes, such that Augustine becomes the forefather of the Cartesian cogito. However, one can contest the claim that Augustine is a proto-Cartesian, by tracing back Taylor’s claims to their main source, Etienne Gilson’s The Christian Philosophy of 1

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, 1989).

Studia Patristica CXVI, 5-18. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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St. Augustine, and by drawing on contemporary sources more attuned to Augustine’s aesthetic sensibility.2 In that work, Gilson interprets Augustine’s Exposition of Psalm 145 as the foundation of a self-enclosed interiority that leads directly to a relationship with God. A different sense of Augustinian selfhood can be discerned by drawing on the work of Carol Harrison, John Cavadini and William Desmond. Re-reading Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos 145 with their analyses in mind can enable a retrieval of the metaphysically porous sense of self that is at the heart of Augustine’s writings.

Taylor’s Account of Augustine in Sources of the Self At the time of publication of Taylor’s Sources of the Self, scholars of Augustine treated his claim that the Bishop of Hippo was the forebear of Descartes either with approbation or denial. Nods of approval came from those who thought that Augustine was finally receiving credit where it was due – for all of Descartes’ protestations that his ideas were entirely novel, he had taken the most important from Augustine.3 Others maintained that Taylor had misread Augustine, making the sainted scholar far too Cartesian and thereby denying the religious and theological dimensions of Augustine’s understanding of selfhood and of interiority.4 A third position, aligned with this latter group of scholars, is possible: Taylor’s influential reading of Augustine does not present us with Augustine at all, because Taylor depends on Etienne Gilson’s interpretation of Augustinian selfhood. That reading is problematic, however: it places undue weight on interiority, and ends in dualism, by severing Augustine’s ‘inner man’ from the exteriorities with which it is inextricably linked. 2 Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine, trans. L.E.M. Lynch (New York, 1988). 3 Wayne J. Hankey, ‘Between and Beyond Augustine and Descartes: More than a Source of the Self’, Augustinian Studies 32 (2001), 65-88. David Peddle responds to Hankey in ‘Re-Sourcing Charles Taylor’s Augustine’, Augustinian Studies 32 (2001), 207-17. 4 Stanley Hauerwas and David Matzko, ‘The Sources of Charles Taylor’, Religious Studies Review 18 (1992), 286-9 argue that Taylor’s reading of Augustine is ‘insufficient’, particularly in that he understands ‘“inward” as a substance and minimizes the comments he makes about the Augustinian self as an activity of the will’ (289). Thomas Harmon, ‘Reconsidering Charles Taylor’s Augustine’, Pro Ecclesia 20 (2011), 185-208 argues, very similarly to the present essay, that Taylor overlooks the importance of exteriority for Augustine, but Harmon makes his argument by means of De Trinitate and without reference to Gilson. John Milbank, ‘Sacred Triads: Augustine and the Indo-European Soul’, Modern Theology 13 (1997), 451-74, argues that ‘Augustine’s use of the vocabulary of “inwardness” is not at all a deepening of Platonic interiority, but something more like its subversion’ (465). Lewis Ayres argues for Augustine’s robust contribution to the modern sense of self in ‘The Discipline of Self-Knowledge in Augustine’s De Trinitate Book X’, in The Passionate Intellect: Essays on the Transformations of the Classical Traditions, ed. L. Ayres (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995), 261-96.

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Taylor’s chapter on Augustine in Sources of the Self is entitled ‘In Interiore Homine’, which Cavadini points out is better translated as “in the inner man” rather than “in the interior self”.5 Nonetheless, it is upon the idea of interior selfhood that Taylor depends, claiming that Augustine ‘turns to the self’ and thereby invents a ‘fateful’ ‘turn to radical reflexivity’. Taylor says that he takes the term ‘radical’ from art, and he claims that it refers to ‘the adoption of a first-person standpoint’.6 The radical perspective he speaks about makes firstperson experience ‘our object of attention’ so that we ‘become aware of our awareness, try to experience our experiencing, focus on the way the world is for us’.7 In Augustine’s case, Taylor claims that such reflexivity is made possible by ‘the inner light’, which differs from the Platonic ‘outer light’ through which humans come to know, because the inner ‘illuminates that space where I am present to myself’.8 This ‘first-person standpoint’, argues Taylor, was subsequently adopted by Descartes and has ‘generated’ the understanding that there is a ‘vantage point’ – that of Descartes’ ‘I think’ – that is ‘somehow outside the world of things we experience’.9 Wayne Hankey supports Taylor’s claim that there are strong aspects of Augustine’s thought in Descartes.10 However, when one does not read Augustine as though he is a direct forerunner of the Cartesian cogito, a more nuanced and at the same time far more dynamic appreciation of his sense of self is apparent. Augustine’s human person is grounded in vulnerability, he knows that he is nothing without his relationship to God through others and through the created order. Unlike Descartes sitting beside his fire in the Meditations, seeking self and God by shutting out the world, it is precisely through creation and neighbour – understood as bestowals of divine grace – that Augustine can have any sense of who he is. Such knowledge is calibrated according to an order of love. Taylor’s interpretation of Augustine aligns the saint a little too much with those ‘buffered’, modern selves that he discusses in A Secular Age.11 Augustine becomes a modern, non-porous (or even buffered) to outer influences. In any case, Taylor’s curious construal of Augustine’s understanding of interiority does not depend on a close reading of the works of the Bishop of Hippo. Instead, Taylor’s footnotes reveal where he finds his proto-Cartesian Augustine: in Etienne Gilson’s work.12 The key moment where this is evident comes when 5 John C. Cavadini, ‘The Darkest Enigma: Reconsidering the Self in Augustine’s Thought’, in Visioning Augustine: Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Oxford, 2019), 138-55, 139. 6 Ibid. 130. 7 Ibid. 8 C. Taylor, Sources of the Self (1989), 128. 9 Ibid. 131. 10 W. Hankey, ‘Between and Beyond’ (2001), 65-7. 11 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, London, 2007), 38-42. 12 Lynch’s translation of Gilson’s text was published in 1988, a year before Sources of the Self, and it is to this edition that Taylor refers throughout. Taylor says he ‘has drawn a great deal from’ Charles Kahn, ‘Discovery of the Will: From Aristotle to Augustine’, in The Question of

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Taylor compares Plato and Augustine.13 Taylor claims Augustine builds on Plato’s doctrine of memory in the Meno, with an important alteration. While Plato’s teacher awakens knowledge of something that is ‘with’ because it came ‘before’, ‘for Augustine [knowledge] is the path to an “above”, and indispensable as the road thither’.14 Taylor explains: ‘As Gilson puts it, Augustine’s path is one “leading from the exterior to the interior and from the interior to the superior”. So we come to God within’.15 This neat conclusion is, however, deceptive, for Gilson has inserted a double interiority that is absent from the original text. Augustine in fact moves from exterior to interior and from inferior to superior – a point that will be elaborated in a moment. For now, it should be noted that the swiftness of Taylor’s conclusion does not ring true in light of Augustine’s claims, for instance in Book I of the Confessiones, that the heavens and earth cannot contain God, nor can the human person. There can be no simple discovery of God ‘within’. As is particularly clear from the text that Gilson re-appropriates, it is only in reaching toward God outside of the self that there can be any sense of self at all. Nonetheless, Gilson’s argument is that ‘As soon as Augustinian thought develops, it finds the path of the De libero arbitrio and the De vera religione’, which he claims is the movement ‘from the exterior to the interior, from the interior to the superior’.16 Gilson, however, gives no references to either of these texts when he makes his point. Instead, he refers in his footnote to a passage from Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos 145, where Augustine literally says ‘ab exterioribus ad interior, ab inferioribus ad superior’. A closer translation, then, would be ‘from the exterior to the interior, from the inferior to the superior’; and yet, Gilson translates this line as ‘from the exterior to the interior, from the interior to the superior’. He justifies his translation with the claim that Augustine’s ‘method lifts us up from that which is lower in the inner to the higher’.17 In other words, one’s awareness of oneself leads one away from the world, to the self that one finds within, and then from that inner self directly to God. However, this double dependence upon interiority concludes in a double denial – of the importance of physicality, of community, and of the quintessential instability of the self. Augustine cannot know God without the community of saints who point the way toward conversion; he still needs them, together with Scripture, Tradition, and the beauty of the created world. It should not be forgotten that love, rather than knowledge (the topic of Plato’s Meno, Eclecticism, ed. J.M. Dillon and A.A. Long (Berkeley, 1988) (C. Taylor, Sources of the Self [1989], 538). Kahn, though, focuses mainly on the will rather than interiority as such, and Kahn’s article is a broad historical overview rather than an in-depth study of Augustine. 13 C. Taylor, Sources (1989), 136. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. my italics. 16 E. Gilson, Augustine (1988), 20. 17  Ibid. 256, n. 37.

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which Taylor takes as the proper forbear of Augustine’s radical reflexivity), is the central point of all that Augustine does. Concentrating too much on the interior, one might say that Gilson – and, arguably, then Taylor – makes interiority into a ‘substance’, as Hauerwas and Matzko have claimed.18 Thereby, Gilson destabilises the foundation of Augustine’s argument, particularly as it is to be found in the passage from Enarrationes in Psalmos 145 that Gilson takes as the basis for interpretation. When considering Psalm 145, Augustine emphasises that the flesh is crucial to the Christian life; but this must be flesh infused with the spirit. This infusion pulls seeming parts into proper unity, as human dimensions that belong together come into a whole.19 Crucially, those with faith can see the necessity of such integration of spirit and flesh. Augustine’s insight, then, is that one can find interior through the exterior, and the superior through the inferior. The exterior is the pathway to find the interior, but such interiority is a hollow centre if disconnected from the outside. In short, the ‘inferior’ in this passage does not denote interior self. Taken in context, the exterior world – and with it the body – is inferior, until unified with the interior, superior – which is to say, spiritual – dimensions of the person. While this may seem the familiar terrain of dualism, a deeper analysis of Augustine’s understanding of the ‘inferior’ belies what is actually a nuanced position – one from which Augustine can emphasise the necessity of being outwardly directed in order to become unified with God. A Different Paradigm for Interpreting Augustine’s ‘Inner Man’ It seems that a better – which is to say a non-dualistic and non-static – underpinning is needed to see what Augustine means. Such an approach would account for but not over-emphasise interiority. Three related ideas, taken from contemporary scholars of Augustine, can offer this alternative. These are: 1) Carol Harrison’s emphasis on how the relationship between the inner and the outer man brings Augustine’s incarnate self to bear in a beautiful created order; 2) John Cavadini’s argument that Augustine does not have a modern or contemporary understanding of ‘self’; and 3) William Desmond’s ontological understanding of ‘porosity’, which contrasts with Taylor’s historically defined ‘porousness’. In Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine, Carol Harrison counters the Platonic reading of Augustine favoured especially by O’Connell.20 18

S. Hauerwas and D. Matzko, ‘The Sources of Charles Taylor’ (1992), 289. See Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos CI-CL (en. Ps.), ed. E. Dekkers and J. Fraipont, CChr.SL 40, 2nd ed. (Turnhout, 1990), 404.5. English translations taken throughout from Expositions of the Psalms, Volume 6, trans. Maria Boulding, O.S.B. (Hyde Park, NY, 2004). 20 Carol Harrison, Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine, Oxford Theological Monographs (Oxford, 1992), 32-6. 19

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O’Connell’s particular claim is that Augustine thought that the soul, which he identified with the substance of the human person, existed prior to the body. The ‘soul of man’, that is, ‘had fallen from a pre-existent (spiritual) state’.21 This interpretation leads to an over-spiritualization of Augustine’s sense of aesthetics, and therewith the Christian’s appreciation of the beautiful dimensions of the world. Contrary to O’Connell, Harrison retrieves Augustine’s ‘incarnate aesthetic’.22 O’Connell, on the other hand, claims that Augustine’s insistence on the resurrection of the body, and on the importance of love of neighbour in the Christian life – both of which are embedded in incarnate reality – is frustrated by his ‘other-worldly emphasis’.23 Harrison’s response to O’Connell’s disembodied Augustine can be employed when countering Taylor’s Sources of the Self. In particular, her analysis of reflexivity brings to the fore that Augustine’s emphasis on human spirituality does not deny the importance of human physicality. Harrison states that ‘in referring itself to God, the image of God in man is not self-reflexive but refers to the revelation of God in the created realm and only thus does it come to self-knowledge’.24 In other words, human interiority is not the primary point for knowing the self. Only by being first directed outward can God’s life within the human mind be received and take effect. When divine and human love thereby meet, the ‘inner man’ to whom Augustine refers throughout his work, is fulfilled. That ‘inner man’ has an ‘entire anthropology’ for Augustine.25 But this inner man is inextricably bound up with the physicality of the human person; the inner man is incarnate. Harrison quotes Enarrationes in Psalmos 145, which (as will be seen) insists that the soul may command the body. But this does not mean that soul and body are separate: spiritualized flesh is the aim of the Christian life.26 Therefore, simple dualism does not prevail, for the spirit is inhuman without the body. Similarly, when humans think of the body without the soul, they tear themselves apart. At the beginning of her book, Harrison observes that, for Augustine, ‘Man’s search for God in this fallen world is like trying to make out shapes and forms in a mirror’.27 Mirrors in the ancient world did not render a ‘clear reflection’, and so trying to find the self was a difficult task. Cavadini explores the same theme in Augustine. With Harrison he finds that one of Augustine’s favourite Scriptural passages comes from 1Cor. 13:12. Augustine’s ‘darkest enigma’, to use Cavadini’s apt phrase, is nothing other than the self. Contrary to Taylor’s emphasis on illumination in Augustine’s thought, darkness instead seems to be 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

33. 35. 143. 149-50. 155. 1.

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the key to approaching selfhood. In fact, Cavadini writes that Augustine does not have the term ‘self’ in the way that we now both attribute it to him and employ it as a key interpretative tool. In order to locate Augustine as a person, and at the same time to appreciate what contemporary philosophers would discuss as personal identity within his thought, different terms (and with them a different foundation) are needed, thereby replacing the notion of interiority as a static, inner space. Even more startlingly, Cavadini says that the idea of ‘self’, if it ‘corresponds to anything in Augustine … is this reified structure of pride, an attractive illusion, but ultimately a self-contradiction, doomed to eternal incoherence’.28 In other words, the Christian should not desire to find and cling to a personal self. To the contrary, to live in Christ means erasing all boundaries between self and Christ, so that all who love with God’s love are united in Christ’s body. As Cavadini describes: ‘The boundaries we had hoped were so reliable have become gloriously fuzzy as we look for a separate person, and find only one, Head and Members, the whole Christ, into which we are being transformed’.29 This radical transformation is, then, the nexus for the Christian’s personal identity – and it is as far removed as it could possibly be from the radical reflexivity that Taylor, led by Gilson, attributes to Augustine. Cavadini proposes that instead of considering the human self as a ‘space or statue’, one needs to think through the implications that humans are made in the image of God, but that such an image is enigmatic, until we see God face to face. Proper self-awareness for Augustine is, then, ‘aware[ness] of obscurity, darkness, a crabbed striving for representation, something crying out for interpretation, something more like a cryptograph’.30 To seek for a stable, clear, distinct self is to deny the dynamic qualities of Augustine’s self-reflection, for the self-aware person is first of all outwardly directed. It is noteworthy then, that Taylor claims that Augustine seems to exclude the exterior world as a source for understanding who humans ultimately are. Contrariwise, the Bishop of Hippo argues in various ways throughout the remainder of Enarrationes in Psalmos 145, for the need to be porous to God’s love, through the world. This porosity can be understood first of all by contrasting Taylor’s premodern ‘porous self’ in A Secular Age and elsewhere, with William Desmond’s claim that porosity is a human capacity that escapes historical contingencies and is ‘ontologically constitutive, not just historically relative’.31 The concept in Desmond’s thought can be fleshed out on its own (Augustinian) terms, to offer a vantage point to consider how becoming porous 28

J.C. Cavadini, ‘Darkest Enigma’ (2019), 144. Ibid. 148. 30 Ibid. 143. 31 William Desmond, The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being: On the Threshold Between the Aesthetic and the Religious (Eugene, OR, 2018), 150, n. 40. 29

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to the exterior enables one to pull oneself together, focus, and then stretch toward God, creating a great capacity for praise that orders desires. Desmond’s response to Taylor’s understanding of the ‘porous self’ is most clearly articulated in his contribution to Renewing the Church in a Secular Age: Holistic Dialogue and Kenotic Vision.32 There, Desmond establishes that, unlike Taylor, he does not think that porosity is a historically contingent term; anyone can be porous at any time, just as any person can be ‘buffered’ (Taylor’s term) or ‘clogged’ (Desmond’s term, particularly in God and the Between).33 Taylor employs the term ‘porous’ with reference to his earlier work A Secular Age, wherein he claims that that the pre-modern subject is ‘porous’ in that he or she is constantly influenced by what we might consider external factors and is even in fear of becoming ‘possessed’ by those forces.34 According to Taylor, the pre-modern self was easily enthralled by good and evil spirits, by God, and by other people.35 Boundaries between the self and other factors are ‘fuzzy’. The term ‘fuzzy’ is striking here. After all, Cavadini explains that Augustine maintained ‘gloriously fuzzy’ borders, such that the person is always congruent with others who together constitute the body of Christ.36 For Taylor, in Sources of the Self if not so explicitly in A Secular Age, Augustine’s self is buffered against others and the cosmos, but porous to God within. This makes Augustine a precursor to the modern self because he shuts out the world, but still premodern because porous to God. An alternate contemporary reading both of human nature and of Augustine comes much closer to the sense of porosity at stake. Namely, Desmond finds that all humans are ontologically constituted as porous. And yet, as Augustine describes in his Confessions, God can call to us through the world, but we can refuse to respond. It is important to note that Desmond’s sense of porosity has aesthetic dimensions akin to those Harrison describes in Augustine, which elaborate how humans are, in the first instance, open to the materiality – the exteriority, one might say, or the ‘flesh’ – of the cosmos. Responding to Taylor, Desmond offers examples of the way that music reaches even the hard of heart; of how a blush shows our interconnectedness with others, including God; and of how laughter moves us beyond ourselves – literally ‘cracks us up’, opening us to resources in being, and reminds us of our ‘being together’ at an ‘elemental level’.37 Most significantly he speaks of the porosity experienced in prayer, 32 William Desmond, ‘The Porosity of Being: Towards a Catholic Agapeics. In Response to Charles Taylor’, in Renewing the Church in a Secular Age: Holistic Dialogue & Kenotic Vision, ed. Charles Taylor, José Casanova, George F. McLean and João J. Vila-Chã (Washington, DC, 2016), 283-305, 289. 33 William Desmond, God and the Between (Maldon, Oxford, Carlton, 2008), 35. 34 C. Taylor, Secular Age (2007), 35. 35 Ibid. 36 J.C. Cavadini, ‘Darkest Enigma’ (2019), 148 (quoted above). 37 W. Desmond, ‘Porosity of Being’ (2016), 289-90.

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which ‘at heart is not something that we do, prayer is something that we find ourselves in, something that comes to us as finding ourselves already opened to the divine as other to us and yet as in intimate communication with us’.38 That is, prayer opens the channels of communication between God and humans, teaching us about ourselves by taking us beyond ourselves and into the everexpanding – never stable – love of God. Desmond articulates his sense of porosity elsewhere, and in particular in God and the Between, where he sets out the ways that humans can shut down their capacities for porosity.39 To summarize: porosity is a distinctively human capacity, by which, in and through the world, we can enter into greater realization of God’s divine life. Such appreciation infuses the entire cosmos, and at the same time the self. Crucially, porosity does not take us to a point of stasis, but opens up profound ways to know and communicate with God and with each other. Notably, this is not the ‘magical’ sense of ‘fuzzy boundaries’ Taylor describes in A Secular Age.40 Instead, porosity helps us to retrieve a sense of what Augustine thinks is important about being human – which is to be open to God, creation, and other humans – without falling into the trap of thinking that such openness is accessible to the premodern, but not to the contemporary individualistic age. Augustine Pulling and Stretching Rather than retreating from the exterior, withdrawing into the self in order to find God, Augustine argues in his Enarrationes in Psalmos 145 that we are to realize ourselves as ontologically porous (in the sense Desmond intends).41 Augustine claims that humans are made to praise God. Now, before flesh is finally transfigured, we can become distracted from that activity. When, though, we rejoice in the exterior to the point of situating self-awareness within its cosmic scope, we move closer to our final state, where outwardly directed praise integrates, by pulling together the spiritual and physical dimensions that were rent asunder in Eden. That is to say, when inner spiritual life bonds with the physical, it becomes differently motivated and directed. The external is not banished, but transformed. Augustine articulates this in several ways throughout the Enarrationes in Psalmos, to which we now turn. In Enarrationes in Psalmos 145, to which Taylor and Gilson refer in order to argue that Augustine is dualistic and buffered when it counts the most, the saint in fact argues for precisely the opposite case. His reflection on the psalm demonstrates that when the human person is integrated physically and spiritually, 38 39 40 41

Ibid. 291. See for instance W. Desmond, God and the Between (2008), 10-3. C. Taylor, Secular Age (2007), 36. W. Desmond, Gift of Beauty (2018), 150, n. 40.

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he can stretch out toward God. The integration Augustine finds to be so attractive and fulfilling leaves out nothing of the human condition. At the same time, such wholeness demands that we never remain stationary. Augustine adamantly denies the importance of stable interiority that both Gilson and Taylor prioritize. While Gilson maintains that Augustine moves away from the exterior in order to rise up to God, Augustine argues instead that the interior needs to move from and through the exterior – pulling together body and soul – so as to stretch out as far as possible, with others and through creation, toward God. Effectively, Augustine gives us a model of displacement, which is established in the opening of his exposition, where he encourages the congregation to remember that they are pilgrims, and to ‘Allow the words of God to seize your heart’.42 Maria Boulding’s translation notes that the Latin for this phrase, Rapiant cor vestrum verba Dei, can also mean ‘allow your heart to seize the words of God’.43 Such seizing, in Augustine’s case, demands God’s call and our response: both directions are necessary and defy separation between self and God. It is, from the outset, ‘fuzzy’ as to where the individual ends and God begins, when God’s word is speaking to the human heart. However, such ‘fuzziness’ is not the sign of a lack of sense of self, but instead of selfhood fulfilled in Christ. We are dealing here with Cavadini’s sense of fuzziness rather than Taylor’s. At the same time, this is akin to Desmond’s porosity, not Taylor’s porousness. The theme of pulling together and stretching out makes sense of the fact that Augustine dwells for some time on the phrase ‘Praise the Lord, my soul’. He wants to understand who, or what, aspect of the psalmist is encouraging the soul to reach for God. Listening to the speaker, the soul will achieve greater range; but to know how, Augustine needs to understand what the psalmist means by the soul. Here it becomes apparent that the human soul does not exist qua human apart from its relationship to the body and the exterior world. The soul may, by nature, be superior to the body, but it is quite unimaginable without that corporeal bond. ‘The whole human person’, says Augustine, ‘is composed of spirit and flesh’.44 He emphasises the importance of this relationship, for understanding how humans can be pilgrims – in the world, yet refusing to be ensnared by it. The relationship between spirit and flesh is, it turns out, essential for praising God. This is most apparent when he describes how, when the soul works in unison with the body, flesh is transformed: ‘[The soul is] invisible, but it rules the body, moves the limbs, directs the sense, gives birth to thoughts, implements actions, and makes room in itself for the images of infinite realities’.45 The first point of reference for knowing the soul is the body, 42

En. Ps. 400.1: Rapiant cor vestrum verba Dei. M. Boulding (trans.), Expositions (2004), 400 n. 2. 44 En. Ps. 403.5: totus homo hoc est, spiritus et caro. 45 Ibid. 403.4: Invisibile quiddam est, regit corpus, movet membra, dirigit sensus, praeparat cogitationes, exserit actiones, capit rerum infinitarum imagines. 43

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which designates the person’s exterior dimensions. Augustine’s reflexivity is attentive awareness that includes the body – pace Gilson and Taylor. Furthermore, the soul can only know what it means to be spiritual when it reflects not on itself alone, but on itself in relationship to God – and through others whom one loves with God’s love. Reaching out to God through praise, Augustine argues, the soul expands, effectively by de-centering any sense of the importance of ‘self’. Indeed ‘self’ seems to be rendered in that prideful, defective sense that Cavadini describes. Better to fail at praising God than succeed in praising one’s own created soul, says Augustine. For, in striving to meet God through desiring praise, the soul becomes greater – magnified – and God can enter more fully into one’s life. This is the polar opposite of receding from the world to contract into a small and stable place. Praising God makes us ‘stretch’ and this ‘makes yet more room within [interiora] … for him whom … [the soul] is praising’.46 Ipsa extensio capaciorem te facit eius quem laudas, argues Augustine: by extending toward God, one opens up the space to praise. This inner capacity is quite different from that which Gilson describes. Augustine’s interior space expands as it extends, and is fully alive when it loves restlessly, never severing itself from what is exterior. Augustine concludes that the speaker in the psalm is the ‘rational mind, the faculty that thinks about wisdom, that even now cleaves to the Lord and longs for him’.47 And now, in this context, Augustine argues that the soul of the psalmist ‘recalls itself from exterior to interior, from lower things to higher, and admonishes itself, “Praise the Lord, my soul”’.48 Gilson, as has been described, chooses to interpret this as movement from exterior to interior and directly to superior: shutting out the world, focusing on the self, Augustine finds God within. To the contrary, Augustine argues that love needs to be properly oriented, so that the exterior is not banished, but appreciated as a gift from God and more tightly bound to the spiritual order of love. Rather than being captivated by disordered love for the world, Augustine admonishes: All around you is the beauty of [God’s] work, and it all speaks to you of the beauty of the artist. If you admire the edifice, love the builder…. If you cling to him who is above you, you will tread underfoot what is beneath you; but if you desert him who is above you, those lower things will become your torment.49 46 En. Ps. 403.4: Cum enim laudas Deum, et non explicas quod vis, extenditur in interiora cogitatio tua. 47 Ibid. 403.5: ex quadam vero parte, quam vocant mentem rationalem, illam qua cogitat sapientiam, inhaerens Domino iam et suspirans in illum. 48 Ibid. 404.5: revocat se ab exterioribus ad interiora, ab inferioribus ad superiora, et dicit: Lauda, anima mea, Dominum. 49 Ibid. 404.5: Undique pulchritudo operis, quae tibi commendat artificem. Miraris fabricam, ama fabricatorem…. Si haerebis superiori, calcabis inferiora; si autem recedas a superiori, ista tibi in supplicium convertentur.

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One hesitates to retreat into spatial metaphors when Cavadini asks for cryptograms. Even so, Augustine seems to offer, initially, a way to think through the problematic nature of the self, by representing spatially an order of love that then needs to be shattered in order to achieve its aim. Between two strata, he argues, is the human person. Above is God; below is the exterior, or inferior, created world. Mistaking creation for God, one becomes one’s own source of torment; the world turns upside down, and we love what is below as though it were above, at the same time loving ourselves more than God, by focusing on self instead of moving through praise. And yet, God is not simply above. He surrounds us with his beautiful creation, not so that we deny the exterior, but so that we learn to love it, and its Creator, and thereby others and ourselves, properly. Harrison’s argument comes to the fore. That ordered love, which is a response to beauty, requires attentive awareness to what is exterior. Beauty quickens desire, which yields fulfillment when one acknowledges the divine source of all beauty. Beauty can be understood further in the exposition, by considering Augustine’s two arguments for properly directed love, which does not rest with outward show, but looks to the world as its first point to find what it desires. Reason, Augustine argues, urges the soul, because the soul has become scattered by ‘conflicting desires’.50 Such desires, Augustine argues, have ‘torn’ the person apart. And so he admonishes: Colligere ad te ipsam, which Maria Boulding renders ‘Gather yourself together into your real self’.51 Recalling Cavadini’s claim that Augustine does not have the term ‘self’ in the way that we use it in English, perhaps Augustine’s meaning is more like ‘Pull yourself together!’ And then again, removing the language of self as Cavadini recommends, one might translate as: ‘Pull together your very you!’. Augustine comes then to the fore asking that the person gather together what has been scattered, so as to come closer to God, our ultimate source of peace. Of course, that advancement entails simultaneously realizing just how much further we have to go. The more we praise, the more we expand our capacity for his life, the more we appreciate the infinite nature of our quest – which begins, but cannot end, with a restless love that strives to find its source. Human restlessness is fulfilled in acts of praise, whose beginning-point is a porous response to the beauty of the exterior world. Love for that beauty is not banished, but transformed into infinite desire for divine beauty. The psalmist reminds that we need to pull ourselves together so that we can truly appreciate the beauty of the world. In this way, Christians can taste a mere morsel of that which they ultimately hope for and crave. They long for their praise to be uninterrupted by distractions, and – as Augustine puts it – for that praise to

50 51

Ibid. 404.5: divisa per amores multos. Ibid. 404.5: colligere ad te ipsam.

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become ‘coterminous with [their] very being’.52 The person pulled back together can look at the beauty of the world and see it for what it is; thus reason, or the mind, helps the whole person to become integrated. ‘Focus your minds’, says Augustine, on God, and then you will be able to love properly the beauty in creation.53 Awe at what God has made thus becomes rarefied as a medium of praise that at the same time infuses physical desires with caritas. Increasingly in this exposition, Augustine establishes the argument that Christians do not flee from the exterior world, so as to find themselves. Instead, they are called to listen to the Word of God, which reminds them that he created the world in all its grandeur. The Christian can see the cosmos anew, for what it is – made by the loving God, who made us. In other words, anyone who doubts the love and the grandeur of God should be able to gaze in wonder at the glory of God’s creation, and marvel even more at the one who created the cosmos. Even more, he or she can remember that God ‘took the trouble’ to create humans, and so will also ‘take the trouble to re-create’ them, if they freely choose for such conversion and ultimate transformation.54 A cosmic sense of personal identity thus opens up – the more one finds God in the world, the more one knows oneself. For self to be otherwise would constitute the rejection of God’s gift to us, of the worldly beauty that leads us to Him. Revisiting Taylor’s Augustine: The Cultivation of a Porous Self As if seeking to pre-empt any analysis that would over-spiritualize Augustine’s understanding of what it means to be human in communion with God, Augustine brings his listeners literally down to earth. Employing the analogy of tilling the soil so that life can take root and grow, the bishop speaks of growing vines and of the ‘cultivation’ of the earth.55 It is difficult to think of a better metaphor for ontological porosity that emphasizes the importance of openness to what is exterior. Boulding alerts us that Augustine plays on words, because colere means both ‘“to care for” in the agricultural sense of cultivation, and “to care for” in the sense of devoting oneself to, and hence “to worship”’.56 Engaging in such cultivation can give rise to culture – a living form of worship that is far 52

Ibid. 406.8: Quae erit illa laudatio, ubi quamdiu es laudes? Ibid. 411.13: Attendite, fratres, magnum Deum, bonum, facientem talia. 54 Ibid.: Qui curavit facere te, non curat reficere te? 55 Ibid. 410.11: Nam et tu colis Deum, et coleris a Deo. Recte dicitur: Colo Deum: quomodo autem color a Deo? Invenimus apud Apostolum: Dei, inquit, agricultura, Dei aedificatio estis. Et Dominus: Ego sum, inquit, vitis, vos estis sarmenta, et Pater meus agricola. Colit te ergo Deus, ut sis fructuosus; et colis Deum, ut sis fructuosus. Tibi bonum est quod te colit Deus; tibi bonum est quod colis Deum. Cultor Deus si recedat ab homine, desertus fit homo; cultor homo si recedat a Deo, desertus fit ipse homo. 56 M. Boulding (trans.), Expositions (2004), 410, n. 13. 53

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from individualized and self-enclosed. Again, Augustine offers a way to think of the self that expands outward and upward, rather than shrinking inward. At the same time, this image gives another way to think through porosity, for cultivation both of soil and of soul breaks down otherwise crusted and sealed surfaces, so that life may enter downwards and thrive outward and upward. This image of porosity takes us outside ourselves yet again, for we need to ‘cultivate’ God’s life in us through praise; but at the same time God cultivates us. If he abandons us or we him, then we become like deserts. For Augustine, the person who contemplates creation, observing how it becomes open to life, is the one who can enter more into the life of God. All aspects of this exposition reveal that Augustine prioritizes outward rather than inward movement. The ‘inner man’ on whom Gilson and Taylor so adamantly depend is entangled with the ‘exterior man’. After all, cosmic beauty first calls us out of ourselves, providing the catalyst for a proper loss of self. Turning within is certainly significant for Augustine, but never at the expense of properly outward-directed love. Reaching out to the world and at the same time to God, Augustine finds out who he is through a vibrant sense of loss. When one makes ways for God’s love to flow through every pore of one’s being, the boundaries that a self would like to put up come down. Like water entering into cultivated soil, divine love releases energies that would otherwise be impossible to imagine. Augustine is, after all, a lover of incarnate beauty in ways that contradict the claim that he is a Cartesian in waiting. In abandoning himself, Augustine finds out who he truly is. Pulled together, he stretches out to meet the ever extended and ever-expanding grace of his Creator.

Grief, Memory, and the Order of Love Erika KIDD, University of St Thomas, St Paul, MN, USA

ABSTRACT In the Confessiones, Augustine learns to order his heart to love of God by reflecting on his past loves and failures of love. His reflection often prompts him to re-evaluate his relation to the objects of his love. Though we might take the notion of ‘ordering loves’ to be a forward-looking moral imperative, this ordering of the heart often involves looking backward and can be done in the space of the memory. In this paper, I focus on a particular species of that revaluation: the ordering of love in the aftermath of loss. Drawing on material from the Confessiones, I examine Augustine’s love for his unnamed friend and for his mother. Augustine was tormented by the memory of his friend and by his failures of love; I argue that learning to love that friend in God gave Augustine release from his torment. I examine the contrasting account of Augustine’s grief over his mother and show how he grows in love for her as he grieves. I examine these two episodes to argue that the ordering of love is not always a forward-looking moral imperative; in these cases, it is a retrospective move that gives healing and rest to Augustine’s grief.

While we might sometimes take the notion of ‘ordering loves’ to be primarily a forward-looking moral imperative, in Augustine’s own work, the ordo amoris often involves looking backward and may be worked out (and worked on) in memory. While there are many such moments in Augustine’s corpus, this paper is focused on a particular species of Augustine’s revaluation of love in memory: the ordering of love in grief. I examine two episodes of grief to show that Augustine’s heart is, at least sometimes, ordered to love of God through retrospective movement, a reordering within memory. Recent work on the ordo amoris has corrected long-standing misunderstandings of the concept. Thanks to Eric Gregory, Sarah Stewart-Kroeker and others, we now understand that the ordo amoris is not an exhortation to love the ‘right’ things, but rather to love what we love rightly.1 Yet notwithstanding these recent advances, the 1 See Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago, 2008); Michael Lamb, ‘Between Presumption and Despair: Augustine’s Hope for the Commonwealth’, American Political Science Review 112 (2018), 1036-49; Sarah Stewart-Kroeker, Pilgrimage as Moral and Aesthetic Formation in Augustine’s Thought (Oxford, 2017); and Rowan Williams, ‘Language, Reality and Desire in Augustine’s “De doctrina”’, Literature and Theology 3 (1989), 138-50. These folks, among others, have done much to reset

Studia Patristica CXVI, 19-25. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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relationship between the ordo amoris and memory remains underexplored. In this paper, I investigate some of this territory by suggesting that the right ordering of love sometimes takes place within grief. The case of grief confirms the fact that we violate the ordo amoris not by loving someone other than God ‘too much’, but by failing to give proper attention to the goodness of the person in God. The case of grief also reminds us that the ordo amoris is no reified hierarchy, an articulated structure that we either heed or ignore. Instead the ordo amoris is, at least sometimes, revealed through Augustine’s practice of retrospective attention to his own life. For Augustine, writes Eric Gregory, love is ‘constitutive of being human’.2 Yet ‘the right practice of ordered love is hard’3, requiring a ‘training of the heart’.4 Presumably this education and habituation can take place in diverse ways, but one of the more sustained and vivid examples of a reordering of love is found in Augustine’s great work of memory, the Confessiones. In the Confessiones, reflection on the past makes possible a reordering of love. It is surprising, therefore, that memory (memoria) is infrequently mentioned by scholars in conjunction with explicit talk of ordo amoris.5 In the Confessiones, Augustine learns to order his heart to love of God by reflecting on his past loves and failures of love. He meets himself in his memory, not as a static character, but as a convalescent, a lover of both creator and creatures who continues to learn to love well, under God’s merciful guidance.6 Augustine finds God in his memory, by learning to love God, in and through the life he has lived: ‘Most certain it is that you do dwell in it, because I have been remembering you since I first learned to know you, and there I find you when I remember you.’7 The Confessiones is not a record of lessons learned nor a catalog of mistakes to avoid; Augustine’s practice of confession allows him to revisit and revise his the terms of the conversation around the ordo amoris; collectively they have corrected glaring misreadings of Augustine (by drawing on underappreciated sermon texts and commentaries), offered new and richer ways of understanding Augustine’s uti/frui distinction, and unpacked Augustine’s metaphors pertaining to love of neighbor and love of God. 2 E. Gregory, Politics (2008), 247. 3 Ibid. 248. 4 Ibid. 252. Gregory explains: “The problem of loving is not simply a problem of knowing facts about the good, or of being free from external constraint… The problem of agency is learning how to love in the right way at the right time with the right will.” E. Gregory, Politics (2008), 26. 5 The term shows up in Hannah Arendt’s work, but her account of memory does little to track Augustine’s own practice of memory in the Confessiones. On her view, Augustine glances backward in a way that leaves the self isolated from the neighbor, unable to see that human being as anything but a generic “creature of God”, not an individual who might be loved out of love of God. See Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine (Chicago, 1996), 46-57. 6 See Augustine, Confessiones (conf.), ed. L. Verheijen, CChr.SL 27 (Turnhout, 1981), 10.8.14. My translations throughout are taken from Maria Boulding’s very fine translation, Confessiones (New York, 2012), exceptions noted. 7 Conf. 10.25.36: Habitas certe in ea, quoniam tui memini, ex quo te didici, et in ea te inuenio, cum recordor te.

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love. Only through such a reordering of love can Augustine’s life be made an offering of praise, rather than a cause for lament. Grief, a particular way of remembering what has been lost, is a case study of the role that memory can play in the ordering of love. More than once in the literature on the ordo amoris, Augustine’s grief in the Confessiones has been taken as evidence of his supposed worry about loving the wrong thing.8 Yet recent scholarship has laid to rest that old saw by highlighting Augustine’s sense of the close connection between love for creatures and love for their creator.9 Such scholarship invites us to shift our focus from the ‘what’ of loving to the ‘how’ of loving.10 I am well persuaded that the order of love is moral as much as metaphysical – and that Augustine acknowledges his grief in the Confessiones not to call himself out for loving the wrong thing, but rather for loving badly. My proposal is that Augustine’s experience of grief offers him a schooling in the order of love. It shows Augustine’s concrete practice of growing in love for what he loves. Let’s start with a brief look at Augustine’s grief over the death of his friend, highlighting how that grief serves to reinforce Augustine’s failures of love rather than allowing him to order his loves aright. Augustine describes the episode in Confessiones Book 4: here he reconnects with a childhood friend, and they bond within the context of Augustine’s evangelical Manicheism. Augustine delights in spending time with the friend, yet when the friend takes ill and shows signs of independence from Augustine (by welcoming an emergency Christian baptism which Augustine mocked), Augustine abandons him. When the friend takes a turn for the worse and dies, Augustine is absent from his bedside. The young Augustine is left bereft. He writes: ‘Black grief closed over my heart and wherever I looked I saw only death.’11 He describes the pain and restlessness he felt as he grieved his loss; his sorrow was deep and clamorous. As James Wetzel and others have noted, the noise and theatricality of Augustine’s grief over his friend stems, at least in part, from the fact that Augustine 8 Nicholas Wolterstorff articulates this common view in his essay ‘Suffering Love’, in William E. Mann (ed.), Augustine’s Confessions: Critical Essays (Lanham, MD, 2006), 107-46. He writes: ‘[Augustine’s] reason for exposing his grief [in conf. 4] was to share with his readers his confession to God of the senselessness and sinfulness of a love so intense for a being so fragile that its destruction could cause such grief’ (107). Disordered love, on Wolterstorff’s reading of Augustine, is rooted in a basic mistake: choosing the wrong object of love. 9 Gregory writes: ‘Augustine is not engaged in an abstract metaphysical speculation on what one can safely consider to be appropriate objects of love. Augustine’s God does not compete with the neighbor for the self’s attention, as if God were simply the biggest of those rival objects considered worth of love.’ E. Gregory, Politics (2008), 41. 10 Michael Lamb summarizes this consensus view: ‘On Augustine’s account, the primary problem is not with the metaphysical status of temporal goods or human neighbors, but with human beings who tend to love them in an inordinate or disordered way.’ M. Lamb, ‘Between Presumption and Despair’ (2018), 1040. 11 Conf. 4.4.9: Quo dolore contenebratum est cor meum, et quidquid aspiciebam mors erat.

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has failed to love his friend as well as he ought; in his self-absorption, he failed to be a true friend, and his grief reflects his ongoing self-preoccupation. 12 Clinging to his own grief and sense of loss becomes Augustine’s way of clinging to his friend, but the grief is more focused on Augustine’s own pain than on the lost friend: ‘Weeping alone brought me solace, and took my friend’s place as the only comfort of my soul.’13 Even the very fact that Augustine’s grief is so eloquently articulated while the name of the dead man is left unmentioned serves to reinforce the reader’s sense that Augustine’s attention was on himself more than on his friend. This recognition of his failure to love well isn’t a pious, mature acknowledgement only, but is arguably also a fact realized by the young, grieving Augustine. A particularly crushing aspect of Augustine’s grief at that time was the fact that his Manichaean beliefs offered him no second chance to love his friend more perfectly. From the Manichaean point of view, the baptized, newly Christian friend died under the powers of darkness and had ceased to exist at all.14 There was no one left to grieve nor love. If Augustine’s love was imperfect, that imperfection apparently must remain the final word in the relationship. For the young Manichaean, grief can offer no occasion to grow in love. His friend is dead and gone – end of story – and Augustine’s lament is for his loss. With Augustine’s conversion to Christianity, he encounters the possibility that he might perfect his love, even for those who have died. We see mention of that possibility in Augustine the Bishop’s Book 4 gloss on his imperfect love of his friend and the need to love that friend in God (4.12.18). A more detailed picture of the possibility emerges in Book 9, where Augustine describes grieving his mother. That grief reveals a process of retrospectively ordering loves aright. Augustine begins the description of his grief with this tender detail: ‘I closed her eyes’.15 This gesture, a physical acknowledgement of the fact of her passing, brings a huge sadness surging into his heart. With ‘a ferocious command from [his] mind (animi)’, Augustine checks the tears that threaten to overwhelm him.16 He restrains his son’s tearful outburst, as well as his own ‘boyish impulse’ to tears, because he judges that God, his new father, would not endorse such displays.17 Tears were used by pagans to mourn the complete extinction 12 A sensitive treatment of Augustine’s failure of friendship can be found in James Wetzel, ‘Trappings of Woe: Augustine’s Confession of Grief’, in Parting Knowledge (Eugene, OR, 2013), 58-80. See also Erika Kidd, ‘Parting Words: Augustine on Language and Loss’, Ramify 6 (2017), 59-83. 13 Conf. 4.4.9: Solus fletus erat dulcis mihi et successerat amico meo in deliciis animi mei. 14 My thanks to John Peter Kenny for reminding me of this. 15 Conf. 9.12.29: Premebam oculos eius. 16 Ibid.: mei uiolento animi imperio. 17 Ibid. Boulding translates the phrase ‘iuuenali voce cordis’ as ‘the man’s voice of my heart’. This is something of a stretch in the Latin (iuuenali is better translated as youthful and doesn’t suggest a grown man), but the choice does fit with the broader tone of the paragraph.

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and utter loss of what is gone. Monica’s faith gives Augustine hope she is not extinct, and he judges tears are not appropriate for a Christian, newly baptized into the house of the Father. In this way, he flirts with an old temptation: to think that grief and love of God stand in opposition (as they certainly did within Manichaeism). As a newly baptized Christian, Augustine wants to choose not grief but God, and he is perplexed by the persistence of his impulse towards tears; they challenge his conviction that love of God should quiet all mental or physical disturbances of grief. Therefore Augustine struggles to understand why Monica’s death pains him so.18 Perhaps it stems from the disruption of their habit of living together, or from the affection she showed him, from the inequality of a wayward son’s love for his faithful mother, or from the way Augustine felt his life to have been rent apart. All the sources of pain first mentioned by Augustine (real as they are) focus on what has been lost to Augustine, but fail to attend to the full quality of the loss and the reality of his love for both Monica and God. This explanation for the pain of Augustine’s grief is also arguably a bit rosy, implying that the most problematic thing about the relationship was its ending. Readers of the Confessiones know the truth: the problems run deep. In any case, these rather self-focused sources of pain seem to Augustine inadequate justification for tears. Still dry-eyed, he begs God to heal his hurt. But God does not. Augustine prays: ‘and this because, as I believe, you were reminding me that any sort of habit is bondage, even to a mind no longer feeding on deceitful words’.19 Boulding’s translation here suggests God means to teach Augustine a lesson about not becoming enchained by habits, like the habit of spending time with someone. Yet, given the fraught history of this mother-son relationship, it’s hard to believe Augustine’s big spiritual problem was wanting to spend too much time with his mother. Sarah Ruden’s translation introduces a different note (though both translations are plausible readings of the Latin): You refused to heal my grief, Augustine prays to God, ‘and I think it was because you were committing to my memory, by this single piece of evidence (if nothing else), the chain [vinculum] that every established relationship [consuetudinis] constitutes, even on a mind that’s no longer feeding on false discourse’.20 By means of Augustine’s grief, that is, God establishes in his memory the permanent chain that links him to his mother – she whom he spent so much of his life fleeing. God reminds Augustine that his connection with his mother is more fundamental than he acknowledged, even in his grief. Augustine’s grief is not a sign he is ‘too attached’, but is an invitation to be reminded precisely how (and how much) their lives are bound together. 18

See Conf. 9.12.30. Conf. 9.12.32: credo, commendans memoriae meae uel hoc uno documento omnis consuetudinis uinculum etiam aduersus mentem, quae iam non fallaci uerbo pascitur. 20 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York, 2017), 9.12.32. 19

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Two memories precipitate Augustine’s eventual release of the tears he tried so hard to suppress. The first is a memory of a hymn by Ambrose. A good night’s sleep finally gives Augustine some relief from his sorrow, and, when he awakes, Augustine recalls the hymn, in which Ambrose praises the Creator God for the sleep that releases mourners from their pain.21 Ambrose, a spiritual father of Augustine, thus acknowledges the reality of the pain of grief. Far from suggesting Augustine should ‘man up’ and quit being so sad, the hymn tells Augustine that mourners should expect pain – and look to God’s provision for comfort. Perhaps this paternal acknowledgment of the reality of grief releases Augustine from his impulse to try to quiet and conceal the pain of grief from his father, whether that father be Ambrose or God the Father himself. It is, finally, the memory of Monica that brings Augustine to tears. As he reflects on her faithful devotion, her kindness to all, the allowances she made, Augustine releases his tears ‘to flow as plentifully as they would’.22 He makes a bed of his tears, resting before his heavenly father alone, hidden away from critical and scornful ears. He confesses he weeps ‘about her and for her, about myself and for myself’.23 Augustine surely grieves the imperfections in their love (including his own waywardness and Monica’s controlling attitude). He weeps too in gratitude for the life she had given him, both in body and soul. In these passages, his grief reflects his love for her in a way that captures her life more fully and honestly. Now, writing as a bishop, he cries tears over her of a different kind. He grieves her sins, recalls her virtues, and intercedes for her: ‘Forgive her, Lord, forgive, I beg you’.24 As he prays, he brings his earthly father Patricius back on the scene and recalls they are both his brethren in Christ, perhaps thereby extending forgiveness to them for the ways they had wronged him. He invites his reader and the whole Christian community to remember them ‘with loving devotion’, for they are the brethren of all who know God as their Father and the Catholic Church as their mother.25 Augustine acknowledges her virtues, her sin, and her place within the Christian community. Eric Gregory observes: ‘Augustinian love is neither manipulation nor alienation but a form of arresting attention…. Love attends to reality and emotionally wills good for another, but it does not grasp the neighbor with an agenda.’26 21 ‘Creator God, O Lord of all, / who rule the skies, you clothe the day / in radiant color, bid the night / in quietness serve the gracious sway / of sleep, that weary limbs, restored / to labor’s use, may rise again, / and jaded minds abate their fret, / and mourners find release from pain.’ Conf. 9.12.32: deus, creator omnium / polique rector uestiens / diem decoro lumine, / noctem sopora gratia, / artus solutos ut quies / reddat laboris usui / mentesque fessas alleuet / luctuque soluat anxios. 22 Conf. 9.12.33: ut effluerent quantum uellent. 23 Ibid.: de illa et pro illa, de me et pro me. 24 Ibid. 9.13.35: Dimitte, domine, dimitte, obsecro. 25 Ibid. 9.13.37: cum affectu pio. 26 E. Gregory, Politics (2008), 252-3.

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Indeed, as Augustine reflects on his loves and failures of love, it is arguably his failures to apprehend people in their humanity and particularity that grieve him most. In grieving his lost friend, Augustine the Manichaean fails to attend to who his friend is and thus makes him, even in death, part of his agenda and part of the drama of his own life. Augustine’s initial grief over his mother is somewhat self-focused as well: on his loss of time with her, on the imperfections of his behavior toward her, and on his desire to control his impulse toward tears. As Augustine grieves, he develops a deeper attentiveness to the meaning of her life and her place in the family of God. With this growth in attention, his love grows in perfection. His attentive love for his mother and all that her life meant opened his heart to love of God and thus perfected his love for both. His grief is testimony to his love, and in that grief, he practices ordering aright his love for her. In his best and most honest remembrance of his mother, Augustine refuses to conceive of her meaning primarily in terms of himself. Instead, his love for her opens up the ‘self-forgetful dilectio’ Rowan Williams describes as part and parcel of a right relation to one’s neighbor.27 Learning the ordo amoris is both a gift of God and a gift of time. The stretch of time and our ability to reflect on what and how we love makes it possible for us to grow in love, in and through grief. Augustine’s ordering of love for his mother is also a gift of God. His efforts of willpower, holding back his tears, do little to help him grow in love for his beloveds or for God; that exercise only reinforces the illusory split between those two loves. Instead, Augustine’s desire to cry, the example of his son, words of his spiritual father and the memories of his mother redirect Augustine’s attention to the reality of who his mother is in Christ. Augustine’s transformation through his grief was not his own contrivance; what he received was a revelation. For Augustine, grief can be the space where a heart learns the ordo amoris. His example suggests that as we reflect on the memory of those we love – who they are to us and who they are in Christ – we can continue to grow in love for them and for our divine parents – God the Father and Holy Mother Church – in whose care they rest.

27 In his essay, ‘Language, Reality, and Desire’ (1989), Williams describes this delight: ‘To “use” the love of neighbor or the love we have for our own bodies … is simply to allow the capacity for gratuitous or self-forgetful dilectio opened up in these and other such loves to be opened still further. The language of uti is designed to warn against an attitude toward any finite person or object that terminates their meaning in their capacity to satisfy my desire, that treats them as the end of desire, conceiving my meaning in terms of them and theirs in terms of me.’ (140).

Love and Fear – Antitheses and Interdependent Complements Hubertus R. DROBNER, Paderborn, Germany

ABSTRACT While 1Jn. 4:18 “Perfect love casts out fear” makes love and fear mutually exclusive phenomena, Augustine evaluates their functions also as interdependent, even to the point that, according to Ps. 19:9, “the fear of the Lord is chaste, abiding forever”. On the basis of a selection of exemplary texts, the article intends to give some insight into various aspects of Augustine’s view of the both necessary and meaningful mutual relationship of love and fear.

‘There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love’ (1Jn. 4:18). Augustine quotes this verse thirty-four times in his works, mostly in his sermons, but also in his letters and his theological, apologetical and pastoral treatises.1 The selection of the following examples intends to give a first impression of how Augustine approaches the exegesis of 1Jn. 4:18 and how he arrives at the conviction that love and fear are not necessarily mutually exclusive but rather have interdependent functions – an aspect which, as far as I see, has not yet been considered in the more recent studies on fear in Augustine’s works and thought.2 1 Augustine, Sermo (s.) 23:7; 33:1; 130A:5 (= Dolbeau 19); 156:14; 198auct:4 (= Dolbeau 26); 270:4; 335G (= Lambot 15 = frg Verbraken 43); 348:1-2; 350A:2 (= Mai 14); 360B:1 (= Dolbeau 25); Enarrationes in Psalmos (en. Ps.) 5:9; 67:36; 77:7; 127:7; 149:15; In Iohannis euangelium tractatus (Io. eu. tr.) 43:5.8; In epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus (ep. Io. tr.) 9:4.5.8; Epistula (ep.) 140:49.51.53; 145:4; 185:21.22; 218:2; adn. Iob. 3; De ciuitate Dei (ciu.) 14:9; De fide et symbolo (f. et symb.) 19; De gratia et libero arbitrio (gr. et lib. arb.) 33; De perfectione iustitiae hominis (perf. Iust.) 21; Quaestionum (qu.) 2:172; De sancta uirginitate (uirg.) 39. 2 Cf. Éric Rebillard, ‘Preaching in a Local Context. Augustine on the Fear of Death’, in id., Transformations of Religious Practices in Late Antiquity (Farnham, 2013), 27-35. English translation of ‘Contexte local et prédication. Augustin et la détresse des mourants’, in Cristianesimo e specificità regionali nel Mediterraneo latino (sec. IV-VI). XXII Incontro di studiosi dell’antichità cristiana, Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 46 (Rome, 1994), 179-87; Paul van Geest, ‘Ante omnia igitur opus est Dei timore conuerti (doctr. chr. 2,7,9): Augustine’s Evaluation of Fear’, in Anthony Dupont, Gert Partoens and Mathijs Lamberigts (eds), Tractatio Scripturarum: Philological, Exegetical, Rhetorical and Theological Studies on Augustine’s Sermons, Instrumenta Patristica et Mediaevalia 65 (Turnhout, 2012), 443-63; Paul van Geest, ‘Timor est servus caritatis

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I. Sermo 33 In Sermo 33:1-2, Augustine fully agrees with 1Jn. 4:18, putting into context with the old law and the new creation, with slavery and sonship, and the Pauline notion of love as the fulfilment of the law: As it is written, O God, I will sing you a new song, on a harp of ten strings I will play to you (Ps. 144:9), we take the harp of ten strings to be the ten commandments of the law. Now to sing and play is usually the occupation of lovers. The old man, you see, is in fear, the new is in love. In this way also we distinguish the two testaments or covenants, the old and the new, which the apostle says are allegorically represented by the sons of Abraham, one born of the slave woman, the other of the free; which, he says, are two covenants (Gal. 4:22-3). Slavery, surely, goes with fear freedom with love, seeing that the apostle says, You have not received the spirit of slavery again in fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship by adoption, in which we cry out, Abba, Father (Rom. 8:15). And John says, There is no fear in charity, but perfect charity throws out fear (1Jn. 4:18). So it is charity that sings the new song. True, that slavish fear embodied in the old man can indeed have the harp of ten strings, because that law of the Ten Commandments was also given to the Jews according to the flesh, but it cannot sing to its accompaniment the new song. It is under the law and cannot fulfill the law. It carries the instrument but does not manage to play it; it is burdened, not embellished, with the harp. But any under grace, not under law, they are the ones who fulfill the law, because for them it is not a weight to shoulder but an honor to wear; it is not a rack for their fears, but a frame for their love. Fired by the spirit of love, they are already singing the new song on the harp of ten strings. That, you see, is precisely what the apostle says: For whoever loves the other has fulfilled the law ... Now the fullness of the law is charity (Rom. 13:8-10).3 (s. 156,13-14): Augustine’s Vision on Coercion in the Process of Returning Heretics to the Catholic Church and his Underlying Principles’, in Anthony Dupont et al. (eds), The Uniquely African Controversy: Studies on Donatist Christianity, Late Antique History and Religion 9 (Leuven, 2015), 289-309. 3 S. 33:1-2, ed. Cyrille Lambot, CChr.SL 41 (Turnhout, 1961): quoniam scriptum est: «deus, canticum nouum cantabo tibi, in psalterio decem chordarum psallam tibi», decem chordarum psalterium, decem praecepta legis intelleguntur. cantare autem et psallere negotium esse solet amantium. uetus enim homo in timore est, nouus in amore. ita etiam duo testamenta discernimus, uetus et nouum, quae in allegoria dicit apostolus etiam in Abrahae filiis figurari, uno de ancilla, altero de libera: «quae sunt», inquit, «duo testamenta». seruitus enim pertinet ad timorem, libertas ad amorem. dicit enim apostolus: «non enim accepistis spiritum seruitutis iterum in timore, sed accepistis spiritum adoptionis filiorum, in quo clamamus: abba, pater». dicit et Iohannes: «timor non est in caritate, sed perfecta caritas foras mittit timorem». caritas ergo cantat canticum nouum. nam timor ille seruilis in uetere homine constitutus potest quidem habere psalterium decem chordarum, quia et Iudaeis carnalibus data est ipsa lex decem praeceptorum, sed cantare in illa non potest canticum nouum. sub lege est enim et implore non potest legem. organum ipsum portat, non tractat, et oneratur psalterio, non ornatur. qui autem sub gratia est, non sub lege, ipse implet legem, quia non est ei pondus sed decus, nec timenti tormentum est sed amanti ornamentum. spiritu enim dilectionis accensus, iam in psalterio decem chordarum cantat canticum nouum. «nam sic dicit apostolus: qui enim diligit alterum, legem impleuit… plenitudo autem legis, caritas». Translation from The Works of Saint Augustine. A translation for the

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Unfortunately, as is the case with many of Augustine’s sermons, Sermo 33 cannot confidently be dated. Antoine Degert (1894) dated it ‘around 416’, Paul Rentschka (1904/05) ‘before 400’, Adalbero Wilhelm Kunzelmann (1928/31) and Anne-Marie La Bonnardière (1967) to the years 405-411, while PierreMarie Hombert (2000) once more argues in favour of an early date around 395-405.4 However, all of these suggestions remain hypothetical.5 Though Augustine repeats his thoughts from Sermo 33 in various places,6 no reliable conclusion can be made by arguing ‘similar topic means similar time’.7 What could lead to a definite result would be the establishment of a compelling and irreversible development of thought regarding Augustine’s theology of love and fear as David G. Hunter and Jonathan Yates exemplified it for other topics while rejecting the argument of thematic similarity.8 II. Tractate 9 on the First Epistle of John In his In epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus 9:4-8 from the year 407,9 Augustine interprets fear as inner torture of the sinner, apparently induced by a peculiar Latin version of the Bible which does not read ‘fear involves punishment’ 21st Century. Sermons II (20-50) on the Old Testament, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. John E. Rotelle (Brooklyn, NY, 1990), 154-5. 4 Cf. Antoine Degert, Quid ad mores ingeniaque Afrorum cognoscenda confe rant sancti Augustini sermones (Paris, 1894), 25; Paul Rentschka, Die Dekalogkatechese des hl. Augustinus. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Dekalogs (Breslau, 1904), 15, 25-6; Paul Rentschka, Die Dekalogkatechese des hl. Augustinus. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Dekalogs (Kempten, 1905), 68, 76-7; Adalbero Wilhelm Kunzelmann, Die zeitliche Festlegung der Sermones des hl. Augustinus (Würzburg, 1928), 22; Adalbero Wilhelm Kunzelmann, ‘Die Chronologie der Sermones des hl. Augustinus’, Miscellanea Agostiniana. Volume II: Studi Agostiniani (Roma, 1931), 441; Anne-Marie La Bonnardière, Biblia Augustiniana A. T. Le Deutéronome (Paris, 1967), 14, 41; Pierre-Marie Hombert, Nouvelles recherches de chronologie augustinienne, Collection des Études Augustiniennes, Série Antiquité 163 (Paris, 2000), 402, 404. 5 Cf. Hubertus R. Drobner, Augustinus von Hippo, Predigten zu den Psalmen II (Sermones 22-34). Einleitung, Text, Übersetzung und Anmerkungen, Patrologia 35 (Frankfurt/M., 2016), 1246-7. 6 Cf. Hubertus R. Drobner, Augustinus von Hippo, Predigten zu den Psalmen I (Sermones 13-22). Einleitung, Text, Übersetzung und Anmerkungen, Patrologia 35 (Frankfurt/M., 2016), 407, note 7. 7 Cf. Hubertus R. Drobner, ‘The Chronology of St. Augustine’s Sermones ad populum II: Sermons 5 to 8’, AugStud 34 (2003), 49-66, 66; Hubertus R. Drobner, ‘The Chronology of Augustine’s Sermones ad populum III: On Christmas Day’, AugStud 35 (2004), 48-50. 8 Cf. David G. Hunter, ‘Augustine, Sermon 354A: Its Place in His Thought on Marriage and Sexuality’, AugStud 33 (2002), 39-60; Jonathan Yates, ‘Is the Tongue Tamable? James 3:8 and the Date of Augustine’s Sermo 180’, RÉAug 63 (2017), 81-98. 9 Cf. Dany Dideberg, ‘Epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus decem (In –)’, AugustinusLexikon 2 (1996-2002), 1064-5; Homélies sur la première épître de saint Jean. In Iohannis epistulam ad Parthos tractatus decem. Texte critique de John William Mountain. Traduction de Jeanne Lemouzy †. Introduction et notes de Daniel Dideberg, Bibliothèque Augustinienne 76 (Paris, 2008), 7-15, 368-82.

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but ‘fear has torment (tormentum)’, a varia lectio Augustine only uses in nine out of the thirty-four literal quotations of the verse 1Jn. 14:8.10 His first conclusion is: ‘As long as righteousness has not been accomplished, the conscience of sinners tortures their heart. ... Fear goads, but do not fear. Let charity enter in, which heals what fear wounds.’11 Augustine explains this with one of his medical similes. Fear wounds the soul. However, as is the case with bodily wounds, the physician (Christ) has to lance the festering wound in order to heal it12 – an image which reminds of Augustine’s frequent use of it as the indispensable remedy for original human sin, the tumor superbiae.13 Of course, at first, the surgery and the medicine prescribed augment the pain so that people hesitate to have it performed. However, while the smaller pain was dangerous, the greater one is healing. Therefore, “Let fear occupy your heart, so that it may bring in charity ... Fear is the medicine, charity is health. But he who fears is not perfect in love (1Jn. 4:18). Why? Because fear has torment, just as a physician’s cutting has torment.” Here, Augustine also interprets fear and love as mutually exclusive, but they do have a useful relationship. Fear has a preliminary function to help introduce love – in the same way as the Old Testament law that operates through fear prepares people for Christ’s new commandment of love. However, in both cases, when love is accomplished, fear ceases. At the same time, Augustine is aware of biblical passages that seem to contradict John’s statement, for instance, Ps. 19:9: ‘The fear of the Lord is chaste, abiding forever.’ How can these contradictions be reconciled with one another? For according to Augustine’s fundamental conviction – so often stressed against the Manicheans who loved to point out contradictions between the Old and the 10 S 23:7; 33:1; en. Ps. 67:36; 149:15; ep. Io. tr. 9:4-5; ep. 140:51; 145:4; qu. 2:172; uirg. 39. The notion of fear causing torment without quoting 1Jn. 4:18 is also found in De natura et gratia (nat. et gr.) 27; Contra Iulianum opus imperfectum (c. Iul. Imp.) 6:17 (pointing out “as the divine Scripture attests”); s. 360B:1 (= Dolbeau 25). 11 Ep. Io. tr., ed. John William Mountain, Bibliothèque Augustinienne 76 (Paris, 2008), 9.4: torquet cor conscientia peccatorum, nondum facta est iustificatio… stimulat timor: sed noli timere; intrat caritas quae sanat quod uulnerat timor. English translation of this text is from The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century III/14. Homilies on the First Epistle of John (Tractatus in Epistolam Joannis ad Parthos), trans. Boniface Ramsey, ed. Daniel E. Doyle and Thomas Martin (Hyde Park, 2008). 12 Cf. Rudolph Arbesmann, ‘The Concept of Christus medicus in St. Augustine’, Traditio 10 (1954), 1-28; C.J. Eijkenboom, Het Christus-Medicus-Motief in de preken van S. Augustinus, (Assen, 1960); Marie-François Berrouard, ‘Le Christ Médecin’, BAug 71 (1969), 854-5; Goulven Madec, ‘Christus’, Augustinus-Lexikon 1 (1986-1994), 873-4; Thomas F. Martin, ‘Paul the Patient, Christus Medicus and the Stimulus carnis (II Cor. 12, 7): A Consideration of Augustine’s Medicinal Christology’, AugStud 32 (2001), 218-56; Isabelle Bochet, ‘Medicina, medi cus’, AugustinusLexikon 3 (2004-2010), 1230-4; P. van Geest, ‘Timor est Servus caritatis’ (2015), 302-4. 13 Cf. Marie-François Berrouard, ‘Incarnation et guérison de l’orgueil’, BAug 72 (1988), 796-7; Bruno Delaroche, ‘Christus medicus et la métaphore médicale sur le péché originel’, BAug 20/A (2013), 458-460.

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New Testaments in order to justify their rejection of the Old Testament – the whole of Scripture is and must be in agreement among one another, because all of it is God’s word.14 How then can the Psalm claim against John that fear of the Lord is eternal? Being an orator and philologist, Augustine returns to read the texts more closely. John talks of ‘fear’, while Ps. 19 adds the adjective ‘chaste’ to it. Apparently, they speak of two different things, and Augustine’s explains the difference, once again, using an example which comes, obviously, to mind through the notion of ‘chaste’: ‘The disctinction between these two fears – the one which charity casts out and the other which remains chaste forever – cannot be better explained than by imagining two married women.’15 One is an adulteress, the other one chaste. Both fear their husbands. However, the one is afraid that her husband might come and find her out and condemn her. The other one is anxious lest her husband leave her. Transposed to the realm of the soul, the one is only full of fear as long as she is sinning, or is only chaste lest she is found out and punished. The very moment she is chaste out of love towards her husband, that is Christ, this fear is cast out by love. The chaste, eternal kind of fear, however, is the next step and not of this world. Full of love, the soul is yearning for the promised presence of God at the end of time. She does not fear that he will punish her, but she will continue forever to be anxious lest he leave her: ‘[A] chaste fear, abiding forever.’16 III. The City of God In De ciuitate Dei Augustine quotes 1Jn. 4:18 only once, namely in book 14.9.17 However, this apologetic use is in so far highly important, because it shows the philosophical counterfoil on which Augustine reads 1Jn. 14:8 at the time, that is about 417,18 and because, at this time, his translation reads: ‘because fear involves punishment (poenam)’. 14

Cf. s. 82:9: ‘Holy Scripture is not at variance in any part’ (scriptura sancta in nulla parte discordat); furthermore e.g. ss. 1, 12 and 50; Gerhard Strauss, Schriftgebrauch, Schriftauslegung und Schriftbeweis bei Augustin, Beiträge zur Geschichte der biblischen Hermeneutik 1 (Tübingen, 1959), 68-71; Volker Henning Drecoll, ‘Manichaei’, Augustinus-Lexikon 3 (2004-2010), 1136-7, 1143-5. 15 Ep. Io. tr. 9.6: non potest melius explanari quid intersit inter duos istos timores, unum quem foras mittit caritas, alterum castum qui permanet in saeculum saeculi, nisi ponas duas mulieres maritatas. 16 Ibid. 9.8: habet iam timorem castum, permanentem in saeculum saeculi. 17 Augustine, De ciuitate Dei (ciu.), ed. B. Dombart, CChr.SL 47-8 (Turnhout, 1955). 18 Cf. Gerard J.P. O’Daly, ‘Ciuitate dei (De –)’, Augustinus-Lexikon 1 (1986-1994), 974; Johannes van Oort, ‘De ciuitate dei (Über die Gottesstadt)’, in Volker Henning Drecoll (ed.), Augustin Handbuch (Tübingen, 2007), 349.

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Augustine refers back to book 9.4 where he spoke about the ‘mind’s disturbances/soul’s passions/emotions’ (animi perturbationes = πάθη).19 There, he says, he showed that the philosophers’ arguments – Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics – are rather a fight with words than a real problem. While the former admitted that even wise people can be affected by passions, though in a more moderate way, according to the Stoics wisdom and passions are absolutely mutually exclusive. Now, in book 14, Augustine reasons that Christians as citizens of the holy city of God who live in this earthly city according to the Holy Scriptures and its salutary doctrines (Augustine presupposes that these are the truly wise people) do feel fear and desire, pain and joy (metuunt cupiuntque, dolent gaudentque) – which are the four Stoic categories of the passions of the soul.20 However: [B]ecause their love is right, they have all these emotions in the right way. They fear eternal punishment, and they desire eternal life. They are pained in reality (in re) because they are still groaning inwardly while they wait for adoption, the redemption of their bodies, and they are gladdened in hope (in spe) ... Again, they fear to sin, and they desire to persevere. They are pained by their sins, and they are gladdened by their good works.21

Consequently, if ἀπάθεια [Augustine expressly uses the Greek word] means that no fear terrifies us and no pain hurts us, then we must certainly shun ἀπάθεια in this life if we want to live rightly, that is, if we want to live according to God. ... There is the kind of fear of which the apostle John says: There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever feels fear is not perfect in love (1Jn. 4:18). But this is not the same kind of fear ... the kind of fear that love feels; and, in fact, it is only love that feels this fear. ... the fear that is pure, enduring forever (Ps. 19:9) ... is not the kind of fear that frightens a person away from an evil that might occur but rather the kind that holds him to a good that cannot be lost.22 19

Cf. Cicero, Tusculanae 3.4.7; 4.5.10; De finibus 3.10.35. See Ciu. 14.3, 8, 9; Cf. Gerald Bonner, ‘Cupiditas’, Augustinus-Lexikon 2 (1996-2002), 170-1: cupiditas and ; Andreas Spira, ‘Angst und Hoffnung in der Antike’, in Freyr Roland Varwig (ed.), AINIGMA. Festschrift für Helmut Rahn (Heidelberg, 1987), 129-81 [= Andreas Spira, Kleine Schriften zu Antike und Christentum. Menschenbild – Rhetorik – Gregor von Nyssa, ed. Hubertus R. Drobner, Patrologia 17 (Frankfurt/M., 2007), 67-116, 103-5: Angst und Hoffnung bei den Stoikern]. 21 Ciu. 14.9: et quia rectus est amor eorum, istas omnes affectiones rectas habent. metuunt poenam aeternam, cupiunt uitam aeternam; dolent in re, quia ipsi in semet ipsis adhuc ingemescunt adoptionem expectantes, redemptionem corporis sui; gaudent in spe … item metuunt peccare, cupiunt perseuerare; dolent in peccatis, gaudent in operibus bonis. English translation of this text throughout is from The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century I/7. The City of God (De Civitate Dei) XI-XXII, trans. William Babcock, ed. B. Ramsey (Hyde Park, 2013), 110. 22 Ibid.: si autem ἀπάθεια illa est, ubi nec metus ullus exterret nec angit dolor, auersanda est in hac uita, si recte, hoc est secundum deum, uiuere uolumus … timor namque ille, de quo dicit 20

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In conclusion, in contraposition to the general philosophical conviction in antiquity that fear is an evil disturbance of the soul which must be avoided as far as possible, Augustine reconciles fear with love as a subordinate function of the latter. He does agree with the Stoics and other philosophers that the final aim of every human being is beatitudo, the happy/blessed life where fear is unwelcome. However, he detects a misinterpretation of what fear really is. As long as it is understood as being afraid of bad events, it is indeed incompatible with a happy life. If, on the other hand, fear is directed towards it, it is a valid tool that helps to attain the happy life that is eternal blessedness. This serves as one argument more to prove that Christian faith must be the true philosophy, because it does not try to cast out human emotions, but uses them towards the common goal of eternal bliss. IV. Sermo 348 Twice Augustine preaches expressly on the topic “The fear of God” (Sermones 347-8).23 Sermo 347 can be left aside here, because it exclusively gives an exegesis of Ps. 111:10, ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’, explaining it by Isa. 11:2-3 (the seven gifts of the Spirit) and Matt. 5:3-11 (the eight beatitudes) which both serve as parallel stairways towards the eternal place of rest and peace (§ 2). It neither quotes 1Jn. 4:18 nor touches on any other part of Augustine’s theology of love and fear described so far. Sermo 348 is usually dated to the final years of Augustine’s life, ca. 425-430,24 because he closes the sermon by saying (§ 4): ‘About which I would speak more fully, and range more widely, if a sermon already rather too long did not compel me to spare both my old man’s feeble powers (meis senilibus uiribus) and also what is possibly your feeling that you have had enough.’25 The expression ‘senile forces’ is usually interpreted as pointing to an old man’s fatigue and feebleness. However, according to the ancient usage of the term, senectus started at the age of sixty. From classical times, the word senex could even be used in a hyperbolical way referring to persons between the ages of forty-five apostolus Iohannes: «timor non est in caritate, sed perfecta caritas foras mittit timorem, quia timor poenam habet; qui autem timet, non est perfectus in caritate», non est eius generis timor … hunc enim timorem habet caritas, immo non habet nisi caritas … timor uero ille «castus permanens in saeculum saeculi» … non est timor exterrens a malo quod accidere potest, sed tenens in bono quod amitti non potest. 23 PL 39. 24 Cf. P.-P. Verbraken, Études critiques sur les sermons authentiques de saint Augustin, Instrumenta Patristica 12 (Turnhout, 1976), 146. 25 S. 348.4: de quo latius dicerem, nisi sermo iam longior et meis senilibus uiribus, et uestrae fortasse satietati parcere cogeret. English translation of this text throughout from The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century. Sermons III/10, trans. E. Hill, ed. J. Rotelle (Hyde Park, 1995).

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and sixty.26 Consequently, while there is no indication as to a hyperbolical use of the term senex, Augustine turned sixty on 13 November 414,27 so that no less than the final fifteen years of his life provide the chronological framework for Sermo 348. Augustine starts from Prov. 14:26 ‘The fear of the Lord is the hope of courage’ and immediately contrasts it with 1Jn. 4:18 ‘There is no fear in charity, but perfect charity casts out fear’ to which he agrees completely: ‘He said it, certainly, and what he said is true.’28 Consequently, ‘If you do not want to have any fear, first of all see whether you have the perfect charity which turns fear out of the door.’ However, the practical problem in life is: ‘If fear is pushed out before such perfection is achieved, it is a matter of pride puffing up, not of charity building up.’29 Augustine then gives detailed advice what true love of God and one’s neighbour is and calls for a thorough self-examination. For ‘only that is to be called charity, or dearness, which is not vileness, or cheapness. And what could be cheaper, or more vile than a human being without God? ... How right to tell such a one, Do not think highly of yourself, but fear (Rom. 11:20)! Because he thinks highly of himself, you see, and for that reason does not fear...’.30 Then, Augustine moves on to criticize ‘the philosophers of this world’, namely Epicureans and Stoics (this time Platonists and Aristotelians are not mentioned) who ‘should be laughed out of court’, because the Epicureans counsel bodily pleasure as means to reach happiness, while the Stoics advice imperturbability of the mind in order to overcome fear and all other passions of the soul like pity, sorrow or pain: ‘So these people, who feel neither pain nor sorrow nor fear, should consider whether perhaps they are not healthy, but dead’.31 Christians, though, should fear, before perfect charity can cast fear out ... Fear should grow less, the closer we approach to our home country. ... Thus on the one hand fear leads to love, and on the other perfect love casts out fear. ... There is, however, another fear of the Lord, which is chaste, abiding forever and ever (Ps. 19:9). So it is not this that perfect love casts out, otherwise it would not abide forever and ever; nor is it without point that after saying the fear of the Lord, it adds 26 Cf. Karl Ernst Georges and Heinrich Georges, Ausführliches Lateinisch-Deutsches Handwörterbuch. Zweiter Band (Darmstadt, 1995), 2600 s.v. senex. 27 Augustine himself gives the date of his birthday in De beata uita (beata u.) 6: Idibus Nouembribus mihi natalis dies erat. 28 S. 348.1: dixit sane, et ueraciter dixit. 29 Ibid.: si ergo habere non uis timorem, prius uide utrum iam perfectam habeas caritatem, quae foras mittit timorem. si uero ante istam perfectionem timor excluditur, superbia inflat, non caritas aedificat. 30 Ibid.: sed ea dicenda est caritas, quae non est uilitas. quid autem uilius quam homo sine deo?… recte huic dicitur, «noli altum sapere, sed time». quia enim altum sapit, et ideo non timet… 31 Ibid.: uideant ergo isti, qui non dolent nec timent, ne forte non sint sani, sed mortui.

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which is chaste, and it is with this addition that it abides forever and ever. ... When the soul is on its guard against God’s forsaking it, that is the chaste fear that abides forever and ever.32

Thus, in a certain way, Sermo 348 constitutes a mature summary of Augustine’s thought about the relationship of love and fear. He continues to uphold the compatibility of 1Jn. 4:18 with the Ps. 19:9 and 111:10, respectively. However, he drops the – admittedly awkward – simile of the chaste wife who, nevertheless, is afraid (timet) she might lose her husband (which is inconceivable with Christ) and replaces it by the formulation of the soul ‘being on its guard (cauet anima) against God’s forsaking it’. And he repeats his criticism of the ancient philosophers, but only of those two schools that completely refuse to admit any value of human passions like fear. Conclusion The key sentence defining the mutual functions of love and fear is: ‘Fear leads to love, perfect love casts out fear’ (Sermo 348.4), and in Sermo 24.1 Augustine adds: ‘Thanks be to him, fear of whom is not shaken off by love, love of whom is not paralyzed by fear’ (usually, but not conclusively dated to 401).33 Therefore, the painful fear of punishment has a propaedeutic and therapeutic function to heal the wounds of sin and to pave the way for perfect love, and therefore must not be dropped prematurely out of proud overestimation of oneself. However, together with perfect love, the ‘chaste’ fear of the Lord persists eternally, but not as a disturbance of the soul while on the way towards perfection, but in the sense of an eternal yearning for the presence of God and in order to perpetuate the presence of perfect love.

32 Ibid.: timeat autem christianus, antequam perfecta caritas foras mittat timorem … anto minor sit timor, quanto patria quo tendimus propior … sic et timor perducit ad caritatem, et perfecta caritas foras mittit timorem … est autem alius «timor domini, castus, permanens in saeculum saeculi». non ergo eum perfecta caritas foras mittit, alioquin non permaneret in saeculum saeculi: nec frustra, cum dictum esset, «timor domini», additum est «castus»; atque ita coniunctum est, «permanens in saeculum saeculi» … cum uero cauet anima, ne deus illam desertus deserat, timor est castus permanens in saeculum saeculi. 33 S. 24.1: gratias illi, cuius timorem non excutit amor, cuius amorem non impedit timor. Cf. H.R. Drobner, Predigten zu den Psalmen II (2016), 880-2.

Hope and Conscience in Augustine’s Order of Love Ian CLAUSEN, Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA

ABSTRACT In Augustine’s wide-ranging meditations on the idea of an order of love, the gift of hope comes to occupy an intriguing position. Whereas faith and hope are forever bound by Gal. 5:6, “faith working through love”, hope appears as the middle term that is generated from within, the faith that works through love produces hope in the Christian life. What is more, through his reading of 1Tim 1:5 Augustine associates hope with the activity of moral conscience. Hope is the product and the sign of a good conscience (conscientia bona). It does not float independent of the Christian’s moral life, which is the life God calls Christians to live here and now. Augustine’s association of hope with conscience therefore elicits important questions about the dangers and promise of hope. His ordering of hope between faith and love also invites further study of hope’s function in Augustinian moral and political theology.

The Problem of Hope It is difficult to imagine living in a world without hope, and even more so to understand why one would resist having hope. Hope is instrumental to a range of human goods, including, most basically, the exercise of freedom. Why bother doing anything if there is no hope? Hope appears as the sine qua non of moral action, the necessary ingredient to any political project. Insofar as one seeks to accomplish something in the world, that something lies in the future as an object of hope, not yet realized.1 It could be argued, in fact, that one is obligated to hope. The alternative to hope is a form of despair, a pessimism barely distinguishable from a bald-faced nihilism, even hostility to all purposes, projects and goods. In all cases one is licensed not to care about anything, for the future holds nothing that can claim one’s investment. One fears, in the end, that an absence of hope leads a person to ‘give up’ on the human adventure. Yet the charge can also run in the opposite direction. Hope obfuscates and rationalizes the world we inhabit, providing an escape from the drudgery and

1

Cf. Rom. 8:24-5.

Studia Patristica CXVI, 37-44. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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absurdity. Hope fixates our attention on a world not-yet,2 a future that imposes its own fantasy on the present, reconfiguring it. Hope fosters an imagination divorced from the real, fabricating a hidden pattern and a logic to history; this consoles us and relieves us of the burden of existence.3 The language of hope intensifies our present-day investments, but in doing so blinds us to their moral ambiguities, if not their evilness. In turn, our demand that others show us some hope merely serves our own interests at the expense of their suffering. We call on other people to show us some hope as a condition for giving credence to their cries and laments. At every turn, it seems, we must be buoyed by hope; and this suggests that its absence amounts to more than a discouragement but poses a risk and a threat to our being. All this may be true about the meaning of hope. One way to think about the problem of hope is that it enters into conflict with the work of moral conscience. The work of moral conscience is the work of attention: it demands we look squarely at the world at it is, sans distraction, and to act in concert with what the present requires. Discerning the true shape of the present, of course, requires knowing ‘where we are’ in the midst of that present. If hope takes us out of that location in the present, it would seem to be antithetical to the work of moral conscience. This problem weighs heavily on the religious moral life, in particular the moral life of the Augustinian Christian pilgrim, which is the focus of this article. Augustine, as we shall see, is not unaware of the problem. Augustine’s fame is not especially that of an advocate of hope. His worldly pessimism is the source of much discussion and debate,4 and many know him only as a downer on matters of human nature (original sin, sexuality, etc.). Yet Augustine is also committed to the virtue of hope.5 His religion proclaims it as part of a triad, faith, hope, and love; and his own spiritual journey bears witness to its fruits. The idea that hope might conflict with the work of conscience – a work of no small interest to the author of Confessiones! – would likely strike Augustine as troubling to say the least. Though he never addresses the specific problem of hope and conscience directly, some evidence in his commentary on the triad faith, hope and love suggests some ways to begin to think about his possible response. The task here is to lay down a few useful markers that can direct future analysis of Augustine on hope and conscience. 2 Vincent Lloyd, The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology (Stanford, 2011), 73 and passim. Lloyd is especially critical of the ‘Augustinian’ hope that infuses much theopolitical imagination. 3 Simone Weil, for example, has little use for hope as consolation or imagination, and finds suspect religious teachings on providence and the soul’s immortality. 4 For Augustine’s ‘world-weariness’ and its political implications see Sarah Stewart-Kroeker, Pilgrimage as Moral and Aesthetic Formation in Augustine’s Thought (Oxford, 2017). For Augustine as not quite a pessimist and his contribution to thinking about hope, see Michael Lamb, ‘Between Presumption and Despair: Augustine’s Hope for the Commonwealth’, American Political Science Review 112 (2018), 1036-49, 1036. 5 In Confessiones (conf.) Augustine records that of all the things he came to doubt as a young seeker, he never gave up on believing in God’s care for humanity (6.5.8).

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The Primacy of Love One way to tackle this topic in Augustine is to ask if there is an order to the virtues of faith, love, and hope. The Bible seems to gesture to such an order of virtues. The rousing statement from St Paul in 1Cor. 13 holds that love is the ‘greatest’ among the three theological virtues. What it means to be the greatest remains somewhat unclear. Perhaps love is preeminent among the virtues of faith and hope, or love takes priority to faith and hope. In the scholarship some have written about the Augustinian ‘primacy of love’. In the soul’s every activity down to its being, knowing, willing, the foundational premise is ‘love comes first’.6 The writings of Augustine bear this out in various ways. Love is depicted as the soul’s ‘root’ (radix) and ‘foot’ (pes),7 it is the ‘weight’ (pondus) that carries and the ‘glue’ (gluten) that binds.8 It is said to remain when faith and hope will expire; as Augustine puts it in his early dialogue Soliloquiorum, in the vision that awaits there will be no need for faith, because falsehood is absent, and no need for hope because the object we long for is present: ‘faith, hope, and love are always necessary for health and for looking; [and] as for seeing, in this life all three are necessary for it, but after this life only love is necessary’.9 Viewed from the vantage of the eternal vision of God, love retains a necessity that faith and hope do not. Hope finds fulfilment in the vision of God, and faith becomes ‘superseded by the actuality of the contemplation of the divine’.10 This is perhaps what Paul means by calling love the greatest. Love is the beginning and the end of what we seek; or simply, ‘love is the fulfilment of the law’ (Rom. 13:10). The Priority of Faith The primacy of love comes into view from an eternal perspective where love wraps up the redeemed pilgrim in vision. In the realm of the temporal that is subject to change, the spiritual life takes flight from a different starting point, the starting point of faith (initium fidei). Faith, too, has priority in the order of love. This priority comes to the fore in the pilgrim’s spiritual journey; it prepares the way for the pilgrim to obey God (love) and receive God’s promise (hope). In a recent commentary on Augustine’s exposition of the Pauline triad, 6 Luigi Gioia, OSB, The Theological Epistemology of Augustine’s De Trinitate (Oxford, 2008), 298-302. Emphasis original. 7 Enarrationes in Psalmos (en. Ps.) 9.15. 8 Conf. 13.9.10; De Trinitate (trin.) 10.8.11. 9 Soliloquiorum (sol.), ed. W. Hörmann, CSEL 89 (Vienna, 1986), 1.7.14: fides, spes, caritas, primo illorum trium et secundo semper sunt necessaria, tertio uero in hac uita omnia, post hanc uitam sola caritas. English translation taken from The Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (WSA). Soliloquies, II, trans. Kim Paffenroth, ed. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, 2000). 10 M.G.St.A. Jackson, ‘Faith Hope and Charity and Prayer in St. Augustine’, SP 22 (1989), 265-70, 268.

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De fide spe et caritate (more familiar as Enchiridion), Oliver O’Donovan gives an account of faith’s priority over love. This priority is clearly reflected in how it dominates Enchiridion, with faith receiving more attention than either hope or love (surprising, for Augustine). O’Donovan offers up a reason for this emphasis on faith.11 The value of love’s preeminence as the ‘greatest of these’ is that it affords an important reflection on the spiritual life. It allows us to ‘see’, in the light of eternity, how faith and hope labor towards the telos of rest. This retrospection fleshes out one’s faith and hope. But in terms of living forward and experiencing the spiritual journey, Augustine’s starting point is faith working outward to hope and love. Love is the beginning and the end of the search; but in the middle of things, where our journey takes off, it is faith that directs us and springs us into action: ‘the just person lives by faith’ (Rom. 1:17). ‘For we do not yet see our good’, Augustine writes in a famous passage, ‘and, as a consequence, we must seek it by believing’.12 What is it we must believe becomes the focus of Enchiridion, at least the bulk of it. It is centered on one article of faith in particular: that of God as the cause of all goodness.13 That is the object to which faith must attach. Why is God’s goodness the primary object of faith? O’Donovan’s reading of this section is both subtle and suggestive. To believe or have faith in the goodness of God, a goodness without rival in the universe God created (pace Manichaeism), is to re-orient to a world that is receptive to human agency, inviting and making possible intelligible moral action. It is believing in the goodness of the God of creation that one comes to be energized by an active, affective faith; hence, for Augustine, as O’Donovan explains it, faith is ‘the root of action, capable of generating works of love, and, at a median point in that dynamic, of generating hope as the framework of action’.14 The verse that establishes this priority for Augustine surfaces at two points in his discussion of faith: ‘the only thing that counts is faith working through love’ (Gal. 5:6).15 Without love, the journey would not possible at all, and love is the end for which we undertake the journey; but faith is the starting point and root of our agency that enables us to labor to the end through love. Love and hope presuppose the act of faith.16 One cannot hope and love without believing in something. Even if one’s faith is not the faith that saves – ‘even the demons believe, and shudder’ (Jas. 2:9)17 – this faith will constitute both the horizons and the quality of one’s actions. The faith that ‘works through 11

Oliver O’Donovan, ‘Faith before Hope and Love’, New Blackfriars 95 (2014), 177-89. De ciuitate Dei (ciu.), ed. B. Dombart, CChr.SL 47-8 (Turnhout, 1955), 19.4: «iustus ex fide uiuit»; quoniam neque bonum nostrum iam uidemus, unde oportet ut credendo quaeramus… 13 De fide spe at caritate (ench.) 3.9. 14 O. O’Donovan, ‘Faith before Hope and Love’ (2014), 181. 15 Ench., ed. M.P.J. van den Hout et al., CChr.SL 46 (Turnhout, 1969), 2.8; 18.67: fidem quae per dilectionem operator. 16 O. O’Donovan, ‘Faith before Hope and Love’ (2014), 181. 17 Ench. 2.8: «et daemones credunt, et contremiscunt». 12

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love’ is not, however, merely cognitive. It consists in more than just propositional content. It entails an evaluative perception of the good: and beyond that, a perception of the origin of that good, God. To encounter created good does not require faith in God. But to believe in God’s goodness as the ‘cause’ of all good provides the agent with the grounds and motivation for self-extension: for exercising the faith that works through love in obedience. And out of that faith working through love in obedience, hope will be generated and sustained – a point we return to in a moment below. Augustine thus prioritizes faith not as a cognitive assent but as a ‘moral apprehension’ with both cognitive and affective aspects.18 This explains why he turns in later parts of Enchiridion to recapitulate God’s works as revealed in scripture, ‘a history of divine goodness’.19 More than just an independent, transcendent good ‘out there’, God communicates his goodness in creation and history. There is a parallel between this divine self-communicating act, which ‘ventures out of itself into self-giving, generating the narrative of creation’,20 and the faith that must also venture out of itself, further manifesting goodness through selfgiving acts: ‘faith that works through love’. This parallel captures Augustine’s priority of faith. Viewed from the position of the pilgrim on the way, faith is the opening to the journey of salvation, the life of charity: ‘the just person lives by faith’. Faith extends outward to the world God created, to the goodness that is there and invites our response. It is precisely in the extension of faith through love that hope comes to surface in the pilgrim’s spiritual journey.

The Middle Term, Hope We turn now to Augustine’s reading of 1Tim. 1:5, a verse that almost duplicates Paul’s triad faith, hope, and love. The Apostle Paul there writes, ‘the end of the law is love, from a pure heart, and a good conscience, and faith without pretense’.21 Augustine often conjoins this verse with Paul’s statement in 1Cor. 13. For example, in one of his entries on Psalm 31, he first glosses 1Tim. 1:5, ‘Now when people perform good actions their charity endows them (dat ei) with the hope that proceeds with a good conscience; for it is a good conscience that gives rise (gerit) to hope’.22 He then cites 1Cor. 13:13 to set up this question: 18

O. O’Donovan, ‘Faith before Hope and Love’ (2014), 182. Ibid. 182. 20 Ibid. 182. 21 En. Ps., ed. E. Dekkers and J. Fraipoint, CChr.SL 38 (Turnhout, 1990), 31(2).5: «finis … praecepti est caritas de corde puro, et conscientia bona, et fide non ficta». English translations taken throughout from WSA. Expositions of the Psalms, III/15, trans. Maria Boulding, ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, 2000). 22 Ibid. 31(2).5: ipsa enim caritas bene operantis dat ei spem bonae conscientiae. spem enim gerit bona conscientia… 19

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why does 1Tim. 1:5 replace hope with a good conscience? His answer establishes a connection between hope and conscience. The apostle substituted ‘a good conscience’ for hope, because anyone whose conscience is clear does have hope … If we are to hope for the kingdom we must have good consciences, and in order to have good consciences we must both believe and do good. Believing is the province of faith, good work that of charity. So in one text the apostle began from faith, saying, Faith, hope, and charity, but in the other text he made charity itself the starting point: single-hearted charity, and a good conscience, and unfeigned faith. But we began just now with the middle term, conscience and hope. Yes, and rightly, because anyone who wants to have good hope needs to have a good conscience, and to have a good conscience we must both believe and work. So from this middle term, hope, we can work backward to the beginning, that is, to faith; and forward to the end, which is charity.23

Here, the first thing to note is Augustine’s flexibility with the ordering the virtues of faith, hope and love. It all depends on what one wants to communicate with it. In this case, he starts from the ‘middle term’ (medio) of hope. Hope is the result of a faithful love or loving faith; hope, he says, springs from the possession of a good conscience (which means ‘clean conscience’). We may wonder what he means by locating hope as a middle term. Both faith and love can justifiably claim the priority, but hope seems relegated to an after-effect, the result of faith operating through love in this life. In De doctrina Christiana Augustine appears to repeat the point. Again with reference to 1Tim. 1:5, he states that ‘[g]ood honest morals belong to loving God and one’s neighbor’ – the virtue of love – whereas ‘the truth of the faith [belongs to] knowing God and one’s neighbor’ – the virtue of faith.24 And hope, he then writes, ‘lies in everybody’s own conscience’ based on the following condition: ‘to the extent that you perceive yourself to be making progress in the love of God and neighbor, and in the knowledge of them’.25 23 Ibid. 31(2).5: prospe bonam conscientiam posuit. ille enim sperat, qui bonam conscientiam gerit … ut ergo speret regnum, habeat bonam conscientiam; et ut habeat bonam conscientiam, credat, et operetur. quod credit fidei est, quod operatur caritatis est. illo ergo loco a fide coepit apostolus: «fides, spes, caritas»; alio loco ab ipsa caritate coepit: «caritas de corde puro, et conscientia bona, et fide non ficta». modo nos a medio coepimus, ab ipsa conscientia et spe. Qui uult, inquam, habere bonam spem, habeat bonam conscientiam; ut autem habeat bonam conscientiam, credat, et operetur. a medio imus ad initium et finem; credat, et operetur. quod credit, fidei est; quod operatur, caritatis est. 24 De doctrina christiana (doctr. chr.), ed. M. Simonetti, Sant’ Agostino, L’istruzione cristiana (Milan, 1994), 3.10.14: morum honestas ad diligendum deum et proximum, fidei ueritas ad cognoscendum deum et proximum pertinet. English translation taken from WSA. Teaching Christianity, I/11, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. J.E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, 1996). Lest it seem here that Augustine interprets faith as strictly cognitive or propositional, this ‘knowledge’ of God and neighbor is the knowledge of their goodness, not just there are existence (indeed, existence is convertible with goodness, and therefore commands both a cognitive and affective response). 25 Ibid. 3.10.14: spes autem sua cuique est in conscientia propria, quemadmodum se sentit ad dilectionem dei et proximi cognitionemque proficere.

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In both cases it is evident that hope follows faith and love; it does not, it seems, claim a priority in the triad. Why is that? Beginning with hope would seem to court spiritual danger. Not that faith cannot be faith in the wrong kind of thing – again, ‘even the demons believe, and shudder’ – or that love cannot reach out for and attach to the wrong object. But hope is only hope for ‘good things’,26 Augustine writes, and in a sense it ‘rides along’ with the things we place faith in,27 especially the promises of God. To begin with hope in God’s promise, then, would seem natural enough; but in hoping for things not yet seen in the future, one can outpace the faith that looks back to God’s actions, as well as the love that attends presently to the good to be done, the evil to be avoided. There is, in other words, the possibility of a bad kind of hope: a hope that operates outside the economy of ‘faith working through love’, or rather, a hope that operates outside the work of moral conscience. In a sermon on Ps. 51, Augustine addresses this bad kind of hope. Setting up a contrast between hope and despair, Augustine claims that Ps. 51 is about ‘someone repenting, someone wishing to retrieve the hope he had lost…’28 To give up on the possibility of pardon from God is to despair of God’s goodness (an object of faith) and give in to the devil. This leads to what Augustine calls ‘the gladiator mentality’.29 Since a person has no hope of ever living a just life, he gives in to his lusts with a kind of reckless abandon, ‘perish[ing] out of despair’.30 But the devil is equally pleased if instead of giving up, this person makes an attempt at offering excuses for his sin. One way to do this is to deny the sin; but the other way is to believe in God’s promise of forgiveness – Augustine cites Ez. 18:21, ‘I will forget all his iniquities’ – only to end up perishing not from despair but from hope. How is it possible to perish from hope? By having faith, Augustine explains, without working through love. By circumventing love in order to embrace a bad hope. The ‘evil-minded hoper’31 thinks that grace is a license; that God’s promise of pardon ‘give[s] the green light to sins’,32 justifying deferment of moral self-reckoning and repentance. If the demons believe and yet tremble without hope, here the so-called Christian has his faith without love; and therefore has a hope that has yet to be purified through conscience.33 26

Ench. 2.8: spes autem non nisi bonarum rerum est… In ench. Augustine puzzles through the difference between faith and hope, since both take objects that are not yet seen, as scripture attests (Heb. 11:1; Rom. 8:24-5). He reasons that faith can take past, present and future objects, while hope can take only future objects; thus, faith and hope coincide in relation to the future. For a proposal that hope is not a virtue properly speaking but rather piggybacks on faith as a rhetorical ‘tactic’, see V. Lloyd, The Problem with Grace (2011), 70-88. 28 Sermo (s.), ed. C. Lambot, CChr.SL 41 (Turnhout, 1961), 20.1: Psalmus est paenitentis, amissam spem recuperare cupientis… 29 Ibid. 20.3: omnino animo quodam gladiatoricio… 30 Ibid. 20.3: tales desperatione pereunt. 31 Ibid. 20.4: maligne sperator… 32 Ibid. 20.4: dabis ergo laxamentum peccatis… 33 Augustine’s infamous ‘prayer’ in conf. 8, ‘give me chastity and self-restraint, but not yet’, might serve as an instance of this faith that has yet to work through love. Already a believer at 27

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For a bad hope is a premature or hastily gained hope. It sidesteps the practices of repentance, prayer, and confession. It also misunderstands the true meaning of God’s promise, abusing that promise outside the faith that works through love. In his writings Augustine signals that the ‘middle term’ of hope is not to be thought of as an easily gained or quickly summoned virtue. It is a gift just as the gifts of faith and hope, and even more so a gift in that it comes from the future, as we labor, faithfully, in the present through love. Does this satisfy or begin to address the contemporary critics of hope? At the very least, it highlights Augustine’s anchoring of hope in the work of moral conscience in this vale of tears. ‘We, therefore, walk in the reality of toil, but in the hope of rest, in the flesh of our old self, but in the faith of our new self’.34

this point in his journey, he has yet to purify his conscience by the faith that works through love, i.e., through continence and the putting on of the Lord Jesus Christ. Hope is noticeably absent from his account in conf. 8. 34 Epistula (ep.), ed. A. Goldbacher, CSEL 34/2 (Vienna, 1898), 55.14.26 (= Ad. inquisitions Ianuarii [inq. Ian]): ambulamus ergo in re laboris sed in spe quietis, in carne uetustatis sed in fide nouitatis. English translation taken from WSA. Letters 1-99, II/1, trans. Roland Teske, ed. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, 1997).

The Formation of Conscience in Augustine and Today Allan FITZGERALD, O.S.A., Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA

ABSTRACT Conscience is often portrayed as the inner voice of an individual that speaks truth to the heart in spite of rival or competing values or that gnaws at the mind when a bad choice has been made. Augustine’s vision seeks to form the consciences of his people by highlighting how acting out love of neighbor stimulates healthy belonging to the community and develops consciences. This paper studies his commentary on the first letter of John – preached in the waning period of Donatist domination – which calls upon Catholic and Donatist alike to treat one another according to the image of God with which all have been stamped. Thus can conscience-based living begin to heal a world that was polarized by moving beyond the tribal-like group-think that paralyzed individuals in the face of the challenges that set one group against another.

Initial Contextualization One can wonder whether it is possible to talk about the formation of conscience in a world of individual self-interest or in a world where the influence of religion makes conscience appear to be sectarian. Whatever the difficulty, the value of talking about conscience-based living is that it provides at least one way to begin to heal a world that is polarized, even at times tribal in its decisions. In fact, that effort may also be the most practical way to move beyond the tribal-like group-think that paralyzes individuals in the face of the thinking that sets one group against another – a statement that only makes sense if the formation of conscience is seen as knowing oneself truly in relation to God and to neighbor. Knowing oneself is, for St Augustine,1 both a description of the virtue of humility as well as a path to conscience formation. In other words, it is by reflecting on the decisions we make that we learn to sort out the good and the not-so-good in an imperfect world, coming to know ourselves by recognizing that ‘we are what we love’.2 In this imperfect world, conscience is a part of the desire to live in the image of the one who made us, 1 Augustine, In Iohannis euangelium tractatus (Io. eu. tr.), ed. R. Willems, CChr.SL 36 (Turnhout, 1954), 25.16: tu, homo, cognosce quia es homo: tota humilitas tua, ut cognoscas te. 2 Cf. James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids, 2016).

Studia Patristica CXVI, 45-60. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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whether it is described as discernment (Ignatius of Loyola) or as a return to one’s heart (Augustine). The process is much the same: getting in touch with that which makes each of us who we are in the sight of God. Conscience, however, cannot be just about ‘me’. A mature conscience must recognize that all are connected to one another and each is made in the image and likeness of God in some unique way. Everyone makes decisions that affect others, depending somehow upon the way that others make decisions as well. Thus does relationship – or friendship – matter in any discussion of the work of conscience. Learning to live in good conscience is deeply influenced by the connections that people have to others – thus setting any discussion of the formation of conscience within a process of seeking the common good by loving others in the way we wish to be loved.3 Present-Day Cultural Context To set this reflection on conscience and moral decision-making within a significant and unfolding cultural context, therefore, must notice that the polarization of our time has tended to lead people to ‘to go along with the crowd’ so that the so-called ‘truths’ of this or that group tend to hold sway. Comfort in numbers – through a reliance on social media and a diminished importance given to religion – is very much a part of the complex process of change of the last half century. That change – along with the serious disintegration in human relations – makes conscience formation all the more important. It should also be noted that the present challenge is not unusual when significant change or progress occurs – as it was thoughtfully foreseen in the Vatican II document on The Church in the Modern World: Sacred Scripture teaches the human family what the experience of the ages confirms: that while human progress is a great advantage to man, it brings with it a strong temptation.

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Significant contributions to this article include a book by Joseph Clair, Discerning the Good in the Letters and Sermons of St. Augustine (New York, 2016), and an unpublished dissertation by Augustine E. Ebido, ‘Conscience and Community: Exploring the Relationship between Conscience formation and Systemic Corruption (in Nigeria)’ (Duquesne University Doctoral dissertation, 2014), https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/512. Research into the process of integrating reason, emotion and action in the discussion of conscience was explored by Manfred Svensson, ‘Augustine on Moral Conscience’, The Heythrop Journal 54 (2013), 42-54. Other resources include Ian Clausen, ‘Seeking the Place of Conscience in Higher Education: An Augustinian View’, Religions 6 (2015), 286-98; Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, ‘Conscience and Truth’, Communio 37 (2010), 529-38; Sidney Callaghan, In Good Conscience (New York, 1991); Allan Fitzgerald, ‘Augustine, Conscience and the Inner Teacher’, SP 86 (2017), 3-11; Charles E. Curran, ‘Conscience in the Light of the Catholic Moral Tradition’, in Readings in Moral Theology No. 14: Conscience (Mahwah, 2004), 3-24; Robert Dodaro, ‘Augustine and the Possibility of Political Conscience’, in C.P. Mayer (ed.), Augustinus – Ethik und Politik. Zwei Würzburger Augustinus-Studientage (Würzburg, 2009), 223-41.

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For when the order of values is jumbled and bad is mixed with the good, individuals and groups pay heed solely to their own interests, and not to those of others. Thus it happens that the world ceases to be a place of true brotherhood.4

A world that is disoriented in this way requires new efforts to plant the seeds for the formation of consciences according to something more than this or that particular set of values or creeds – whether they be social, political, economic or religious. The rediscovery of conscience as a ‘natural mechanism for selftranscendence (selflessness)’5 becomes all the more important insofar as it may be the only way to move beyond the tendency for group-think where there is a real failure to seek the truth that unites and the good that is shared. Augustine of Hippo Augustine lived at a time of deep, century-long division among North African Christians. Some significant challenges at the beginning of the fourth century had led to that separation and to the consequent development of group-centered ways. His initial concern – at the time of his arrival in Hippo – was expressed as a desire to work for the good of others.6 Even though neighbor was set against neighbor – sometimes in violent ways – Augustine chose to work on crossing or overcoming the presumed lines of division. He did that, in the first place, by identifying the problem. He composed a short, rhythmic text that could be repeated by his people (‘the least, the ignorant, the uneducated’) – an effort that quickly proved to be inadequate.7 After that, he tried (several times) 4 Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes #37. It would also be good to notice a connection with another lament of that document, namely about the serious problem of the split between the faith that is professed and the life that is led (Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes #43). 5 A.E. Ebido, ‘Conscience and Community’ (2014), 372. 6 Augustine, Epistula (ep.), ed. A. Goldbacher, CSEL 34/1 (Vienna, 1895), 21.4: ‘… how am I to exercise this ministry for the salvation of others, not seeking what is beneficial for me, but for many, that they may be saved (1Cor 10:33)?’ (sed hoc ipsum quo modo ministrem ad salutem aliorum «non quaerens, quod mihi utile est, sed quod multis, ut salui fiant»). English translation taken from The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (WSA). Letters 1-99, II/1, trans. Roland Teske, ed. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, NY, 1990). See too Allan Fitzgerald, ‘When Augustine was a priest: pride, common good and Donatism’, Augustinian Studies 40 (2009), 37-48. 7 Augustine, Retractationes (retr.), ed. A. Mutzenbecher, CChr.SL 57 (Turnhout, 1984), 1.20: ‘I wanted the cause of the Donatists to come to the knowledge of the most humble people, the ignorant and the unlettered, and be engraved in their memory as much as was in my power. I therefore composed a psalm for them to sing in the order of Latin letters, the kind called ‘alphabetic’; but I went no further than the letter V. I left aside the last three letters and in their place added an epilogue at the very end, as if their mother church was speaking to them. Similarly, the refrain that is taken up again and the prologue, which is also to be sung, are not in letter order… I wanted this psalm to be written not in the manner of a classical poem, so as not to be constrained by metrical requirements to use words that are seldom used by the people’ (uolens etiam causam Donatistarum ad ipsius humillimi uulgi et omnino imperitorum atque idiotarum notitiam peruenire,

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to enter into dialogue with some of the leaders of that community.8 When that also failed, he was called upon to refute some significant works from some prominent leaders of the Donatist community.9 This paper deals with the time that follows those efforts by centering its attention primarily on Augustine’s commentary on the first letter of John – homilies preached to the Catholic community in Hippo in 407.10 As a result of the Edict of Unity that was promulgated by Honorius in 405, the experience of violence against Catholics had begun to wane.11 Augustine appears to have sensed that the changed atmosphere offered him an opportunity to try to form or reform the consciences of his people. By this time, he was no longer thinking in piecemeal or rudimentary fashion, but had decided to use an important Scripture text (the first letter of John) to show that love-of-neighbor had to be at the heart of his efforts. Although this commentary was addressed primarily to the members of the Catholic community,12 Augustine was thinking about how to get divided families and neighborhoods to grow in their understanding of what it means to love God by loving others – even those who may treat or have treated them with disdain – making sure that they did not aggravate past hurts by righteous anger or out of a need for ‘payback’ or retribution.13 That meant that he had to teach Catholics and non-Catholics alike how to build unity with neighbors, that is, how to live et eorum quantum fieri per nos posset inhaerere memoriae, psalmum qui eis cantaretur per Latinas litteras feci, sed usque ad u litteram. quales abecedarias appellant. tres uero ultimas omisi; sed pro eis nouissimum quasi epilogum adiunxi, tamquam eos mater adloqueretur ecclesia. hypopsalma etiam, quod respondetur, et prooemium causae, quod nihilominus cantaretur, non sunt in ordine litterarum; earum quippe ordo incipit post prooemium. Ideo autem non aliquo carminis genere id fieri uolui, ne me necessitas metrica ad aliqua uerba quae uulgo minus sunt usitata conpelleret… ideo autem non aliquo carminis genere id fieri uolui, ne me necessitas metrica ad aliqua uerba quae uulgo minus sunt usitata conpelleret). English translation taken from WSA. Revisions, I/2, trans. R. Teske, ed. B. Ramsey (Hyde Park, 2010). 8 See Augustine, epp. 33, 43, 44, 49, 51 and 52. 9 J. Kevin Coyle, ‘Anti-Donatist writings’, in A. Fitzgerald et al. (eds), Augustine Through the Ages: an Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, MI, 1999), 34-40. 10 One recent study of these sermons shows that – along with another 30 or so sermons – they were preached within the same time period: Adam Ployd, Augustine, the Trinity, and the Church: A Reading of the Anti-Donatist Sermons (Oxford, 2015). For my previous article on conscience, see Allan Fitzgerald, ‘Augustine, Conscience and the Inner Teacher’ (2017), 3-11. 11 In 405, the Emperor Honorius issued the Edict of Unity whereby Donatist clergy were to be exiled, membership in the Donatist church was criminalized, and Donatist properties could be turned over to the Catholic church. 12 In fact, the primary audience – the Catholic community – was smaller than that of those who had come to be called Donatists. 13 A rich resource for this paper is found in the little book by Agostino Clerici, Ama e Fa’ Quello che Vuoi, Quaerere Deum Collection 8 (Palermo, 1992) – a discussion of fraternal correction in the life and thought of St Augustine. His work is insightful and diligent. It will be used in this paper as a basis for asking practical questions about Augustine’s efforts to educate the consciences of his people as a way of addressing the present-day challenge.

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together in the light of Christ.14 These homilies recognize – in a forthright way – that the love of God and the love of neighbor had to be tightly intertwined; the one could not succeed without the other according to John (1Jn. 4:19). In that process he sought to re-frame the most basic categories for decisionmaking in terms of paying attention to the work of the God of love rather than defending certain ideals which were continually debated from the time of the origins of the separation between Catholics and Donatists. He was teaching the importance of having a conscience that would understand why the separation among Christians into those who were or were not faithful under persecution was a failure, not a value.15 It was, quite specifically, a failure to love one’s neighbor. His hope was clear and straightforward: there is a way to build or rebuild the Christian community in spite of anger, violence and misunderstanding. Augustine set about the process of teaching what John had to say in his first letter, developing a biblical understanding of what it meant to be human and how – in the midst of a human, imperfect world – to reconcile one’s life with the demand that one follow the way of Jesus Christ. Only by loving as Christ loved could unity be re-found. The phrase which he used and which can summarize that effort is ‘love and do what you will’.16

Augustine’s Experience: A Snapshot It may be helpful to pause and look briefly at the origins of Augustine’s awareness of the role that his own conscience would play. That will be a snapshot of when he first articulated what would become his ‘take’ on conscience. An episode described in Book 3 of the Confessions – with the benefit of hindsight, of course – took place in Carthage as he was beginning his studies there. He wrote: Through your mercy, Lord, my tender little heart had drunk in that name, the name of my Savior and your Son, with my mother’s milk and, in my deepest heart, I still held 14 See my talk from April 2019, ‘Augustine’s courage in preaching (doctr. chr. 4.15.32)’, which will be published in the proceedings of the International Conference on Education: Saint Augustine, Teacher for the 21st Century, held at Unicervantes in Bogata, Colombia. 15 The insistence of some Christians at the time of the persecution of Diocletian that those who were unfaithful could not be forgiven or followed led to a more-than-a-century-long division which – by the time of Augustine – was cemented into two opposed communities where neither was fully aware of the history nor willing to bridge the chasm of separation. See Allan Fitzgerald, Conversion through Penance in the Italian Church of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries: New Approaches to the Experience of Conversion from Sin, Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity 15 (Lewiston, NY, 1988). 16 Augustine, In epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus (ep. Io. tr.), PL 35, 7.8: dilige, et quod uis fac.

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on to it. No writing from which that name was missing, even if learned, of literary elegance and truthful, could ever captivate me completely.17

Rather than just a touching memory, Augustine has carefully highlighted what happened as he was reflecting on his experience after reading Cicero’s Hortensius. The intervening years had given him a chance to identify something more than a remembrance of how enthused he had been by the Hortensius. Underlying that experience of having been moved by his reading was a significant facet in his intellectual and spiritual development; it became a basis for decision-making. He understood that there had to be a place for ‘the name of Jesus Christ’. The significance of this experience is confirmed in other places in the Confessions, that is, at the time when he became a hearer among the Manichees,18 as well as when he left them.19 He again refers to this same experience when he came into contact with the Catholic Church in Milan.20 In each case he reached 17 Augustine, Confessiones (conf.), ed. L. Verheijen, CChr.SL 27 (Turnhout, 1981), 3.4.8: quoniam hoc nomen secundum misericordiam tuam, Domine, hoc nomen saluatoris mei, Filii tui, in ipso adhuc lacte matris tenerum cor meum pie biberat et alte retinebat, et quidquid sine hoc nomine fuisset quamuis litteratum et expolitum et ueridicum non me totum rapiebat. English translation taken throughout from WSA. The Confessions, I/1, trans. Maria Boulding, ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, 2001). 18 Conf. 3.6.10: ‘In reaction to this disappointment I fell among a set of proud madmen, exceedingly carnal and talkative people in whose mouths were diabolical snares and a sticky mess compounded by mixing the syllables of your name, and the names of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, who is our Paraclete and Consoler. These names were never far from their mouths, but amounted to no more than sound and the clacking of tongues, for their hearts were empty of the truth… O Truth, Truth, how the deepest and innermost marrow of my mind ached for you, even then while they prattled your name to me unremittingly and in so many ways, though only in words and in their huge, copious tomes!’ (taque incidi in homines superbe delirantes, carnales nimis et loquaces, in quorum ore laquei diaboli et uiscum confectum commixtione syllabarum nominis tui et domini Iesu Christi et paracleti consolatoris nostri spiritus sancti. haec nomina non recedebant de ore eorum, sed tenus sono et strepitu linguae; ceterum cor inane ueri… o ueritas, ueritas, quam intime etiam tum medullae animi mei suspirabant tibi, cum te illi sonarent mihi frequenter et multipliciter uoce sola et libris multis et ingentibus!). 19 Conf. 5.14.25: ‘I decided that I ought to leave the Manichees, since at this period of uncertainty it was not right for me to continue as a member of a sect to which I judged some philosophers superior; but I flatly refused to entrust the cure of my soul’s sickness to philosophers who were strangers to the saving name of Christ. I resolved therefore to live as a catechumen in the Catholic Church, which was what my parents had wished for me, until some kind of certainty dawned by which I might direct my steps aright’ (Manichaeos quidem relinquendos esse decreui, non arbitrans eo ipso tempore dubitationis meae in illa secta mihi permanendum esse cui iam nonnullos philosophos praeponebam: quibus tamen philosophis, quod sine salutari nomine Christi essent, curationem languoris animae meae committere omnino recusabam. Statui ergo tandiu esse catechumenus in catholica ecclesia mihi a parentibus commendata, donec aliquid certi eluceret, quo cursum dirigerem). 20 Conf. 7.5.7: ‘Faith in your Christ, our Lord and Savior, as I found it in the Catholic Church, still persisted steadfastly in my heart, though it was a faith still in many ways unformed, wavering and at variance with the norm of her teaching’ (tabiliter tamen haerebat in corde meo in catholica ecclesia fides «Christi» tui, «domini et saluatoris nostri», in multis quidem adhuc informis et

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back to the memory of what he had learned from his mother’s faith. Not only did the name of Christ figure prominently in those decisions; it would also be at the heart of his own experience of conversion in a Milanese garden when Paul’s words called him to ‘put on the Lord Jesus Christ’ (Rom. 13:14). Augustine implicitly recognized that conscience is not formed by mere personal reflection, no matter how intense. Rather he saw – and accepted – that there was something beyond his control that could be retrieved, and that it both came from and applied to real experience. While the initial memory centered on ‘the name of Christ’, that description would take on more nuance and maturity, both in his conversion experience and with the passage of time.21 It was, in other words, not just a moment of deeply personal revelation, but a recognition of the outside-inside connections meant that conscience was formed by one’s experience – an experience that had a deeply relational quality. At this point the relationship to his mother’s faith in Christ and to the Word of God were key. In his commentary on the First Letter of John, he will bring out the many interhuman relationships that also need to be seen as having an impact on conscience. It can, therefore, be said that Augustine’s experience was that no one comes to know oneself or one’s conscience in isolation from others. People only come to know themselves in the presence and through the experience of interacting with others. Any talk about conscience, therefore, must be set firmly within a communal – not in a merely individual – context.22 The formation or the re-formation of anyone’s conscience only happens in the midst of habitual reflection on things that take place among friends, foes, strangers and loved ones. If it ‘takes a village to raise a child,’ it is also important to recognize the impact of the family, group, nation or world within which one lives on conscience – both in relation to the individual and in relation to the values that a group or community holds. praeter doctrinae normam fluitans, sed tamen non eam relinquebat animus, immo in dies magis magisque imbibebat). Conf. 6.4.5: ‘I rejoiced to find that your one and only Church … within which I had been signed with Christ’s name in my infancy, did not entertain infantile nonsense or include in her sound teaching any belief that would seem to confine you, … after the manner of human bodies’ (gaudebam, deus meus, quod ecclesia unica … in qua mihi nomen Christi infanti est inditum, non saperet infantiles nugas neque hoc haberet in doctrina sua sana, quod te creatorem omnium in spatium loci quamuis summum et amplum, tamen undique terminatum membrorum humanorum figura contruderet). 21 Other experiences in his own formation of conscience could be developed, but this one was placed first both because of its foundational significance and because it placed the focus clearly on the connection between the conscience and the heart and the fact that it emphasizes the role of his mother’s faith. 22 That process can be seen as unfolding in the letter that Augustine wrote to Valerius (ep. 21) where his concern was not his own salvation but that of others and in his commentary on Paul’s letter to the Galatians where he begins to come to grips with the action of Christ as humbly mediating (Expositio epistulae ad Galatas [exp. Gal.] 24-7) the salvation of the Church, the Body of Christ (exp. Gal. 28). See M. Cameron, Christ Meets Me Everywhere: Augustine’s Early Figurative Exegesis (Oxford, 2012), 147-64.

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In the early years of the fifth century, therefore, Augustine’s task was to teach Catholics how to work on the development of relationships among neighbors by working to form their consciences and by learning how to live together in the light of Christ. Instead of replicating the distain with which they had been treated, Catholics were to make sure that they did not aggravate past hurts by their righteous anger or a need for retribution. Using this biblical text to talk about the love of God in the light of Christ meant that love of God and love of neighbor had to be tightly intertwined; the one could not succeed without the other according to John (1Jn. 4:19). The insistence on the interpenetration of the love of God with love the of neighbor becomes clearly practical when Augustine asks how anyone can know whether s/he loves not merely in word and speech but also in action and in truth (cf. 1Jn. 3:18). What is it to have a clear conscience when talking about love? That was a very practical question for his audience, because Donatist Christians were claiming that their deeds showed that they were already living an authentic Christian life. They did, after all, do good works by helping those in need. Some have even given their lives. But, Augustine notes, charity was lacking. Even generous actions can be less than they appear to be. He interrogates conscience: Let us return to the testimony of conscience. How do we prove that many things are done by those who don’t love their brothers? How many there are who are involved in heresies and schisms and who call themselves martyrs! They seem to themselves to be laying down their life for their brothers. If they were laying down their life for their brothers, they wouldn’t be separating themselves from the whole brotherhood. Likewise, how many are there who give away much and who donate much for the sake of display, and who are looking for nothing but human praise and the people’s acclaim, which is full of wind and utterly fickle! Because there are such people, then, where will brotherly charity be proved?23

Doing good deeds, in other words, is a good beginning. But motivation and context also matter for anyone who claims that her/his love is authentic. Thus, the phrase, ‘love and do what you will’, is about much more than acting generously. Augustine’s call to return to the testimony of conscience is an invitation 23

Ep. Io. tr. 6.2: reuocemur ad testimonium conscientiae. unde probamus quia talia multa fiunt ab his qui fratres non amant? quam multi se in haeresibus et schismatibus martyres dicunt. Uidentur sibi animam ponere pro fratribus suis. si pro fratribus animam ponerent, non se ab uniuersa fraternitate separarent. item quam multi sunt qui iactantiae causa multa tribuunt, multa donant; et non ibi quaerunt nisi laudem humanam et gloriam popularem, plenam uentis, nulla stabilitate solidatam. quia ergo sunt tales, ubi probanda erit caritas fraterna? English translation taken through from WSA. Homilies on the First Epistle of John, I/14, trans. B. Ramsey, ed. Daniel E. Doyle and Thomas Martin (Hyde Park, 2008).

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to ask what makes a conscience clear, not just in terms of personal feelings or actions but in relation to the Christian community. Because the Donatists have kept themselves apart from wider fellowship, they affirm division, not unity. An informed conscience had to be consistent with an understanding of the common good. As he continues his homily, he reinforces the fact that true love does not affirm division or seek praise, citing the experience of Paul: [Paul] himself also shows in a particular passage that these things are often done for vain display, not on the firm basis of charity, inasmuch as, when he was commending this very charity, he said, If I distribute everything that I have to the poor and hand over my body to be burned but do not have charity, it is of no benefit to me (1Cor. 13:3). Can someone do this without charity? He can. For those who don’t have charity have brought division to unity. Look around and you will see many persons giving much to the poor; you will see others so ready to embrace death that, after the persecutor has stopped, they throw themselves on him.24 There is no doubt that they are doing this without charity.25

The confusion created by the division of Christians between Catholics and Donatists is such that Augustine found it necessary to explain – over several pages – the workings of conscience, accepting the challenge of providing a way to discern the difference between deeds done to be seen and those which manifest a fraternal love that is true. Significantly, the underlying reality of those reflections centers on relationship, that is, on one’s willingness to examine one’s own heart in relation to its openness to others both among one’s immediate neighbors and beyond that circle of relationships as well. Conscience, in other words, cannot be seen as merely an internal voice or a subjective process of decision-making. The fact of having to turn within and to reflect in the presence of God is itself an action that necessarily includes one’s relationship with others. You can’t say, ‘I love my brother, but I don’t love God’. Just as you are lying if you say, ‘I love God’, when you don’t love your brother, so you are mistaken when you say, ‘I love my brother’, if you are aware that you don’t love God. … It must be, then, 24

The Donatists had, in fact, become persecutors of Catholics. One can recall the order of Faustinus, the Donatist bishop of Hippo, who, in about 380, had forbidden bakers to sell bread to Catholics: Contra litteras Petiliani [c. litt. pet.], ed. M. Petschenig, CSEL 52 (Vienna, 1909), 2.83.184: nonne apud Hipponem, ubi ego sum, non desunt qui meminerint Faustinum uestrum regni sui tempore praecepisse, quoniam catholicorum ibi paucitas erat, ut nullus eis panem coqueret.... The Donatists refused to greet Catholics (Optatus IV.5) or bury them in their cemeteries (VI.7). 25 Ep. Io. tr. 6.2: et ostendit etiam ipse quodam loco quia solent ista fieri inani iactantia, non firmamento caritatis: ait enim cum de ipsius caritatis commendatione loqueretur, «si distribuero omnia mea pauperibus, et tradidero corpus meum ut ardeam, caritatem autem non habeam, nihil mihi prodest». potest enim quisquam hoc facere sine caritate? potest. nam qui non habent caritatem, diuiserunt unitatem. quaerite ibi, et uidebitis multos multa tribuere pauperibus; uidebitis alios paratos ad suscipiendam mortem, ita ut desistente persecutore, seipsos praecipitent: isti sine dubio sine caritate hoc faciunt.

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that whoever loves God loves his brother. But if you don’t love the brother whom you see, how can you love God, whom you don’t see? Why doesn’t a person see God? Because he doesn’t have that love. He doesn’t see God because he doesn’t have love. He doesn’t have love because he doesn’t love his brother.26

When it comes to conscience, therefore, what matters is that each person examines oneself in the presence of God – a process that has to be set within the context of practical circumstances and concrete relationships. Something more than personal introspection is taking place. It is also implicitly accurate to say that an examination of conscience is not an isolated moment but an unfolding practice. Conscience has to be in ongoing development, both in relation to the Word of God and to the wider community. No one saves oneself alone; it only happens through the love of neighbor in God.27 Augustine, therefore, calls for a true openness to one’s neighbor – constantly expressing a willingness to welcome dissidents rather than doing anything that would continue the division within North African Christianity. He did not to engage his people in a fight against those who were separated; his message to all was that they needed to express their desire to work for the unity that each one is called to embrace. Even as his conscience was formed by putting the Word of God into practice and developing friendships into fraternal love, so did his words and actions engage the same process anew. Fraternal love was seen where division came to an end through selfless, not through self-serving or self-righteous actions. That means that conscience is a capacity and a process rather than a personal, special faculty of the individual. The constant interaction of mind and heart with oneself and with others also means that thoughts, emotions, and actions are all included in living morally; the love that has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:5) learns to express itself – not just in specific moral choices but in the way that actions flow from and return to the mind and heart, giving ever-developing shape to who we are as part of the human community. Applying Augustine’s Vision to the Present-Day Challenge of Forming Conscience How is any of this historical background meaningful today? Is it possible to understand how the spirit of Augustine may be applied to an understanding of 26 Ep. Io. tr. 9.10: non potes dicere, diligo fratrem, sed non diligo deum. quomodo mentiris si dicas, diligo deum, quando non diligis fratrem; sic falleris, quando dicis, diligo fratrem, si putes quia non diligis deum … necesse est ergo ut deum diligat quisquis diligit fratrem. si autem non diligis fratrem quem uides, deum quem non uides quomodo potes diligere? quare non uidet deum? quia non habet ipsam dilectionem. ideo non uidet deum, quia non habet dilectionem; ideo non habet dilectionem, quia non diligit fratrem. 27 Sermo (s.) 17.2.

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the formation of conscience to the world of today? What is it, in fact, that allows anyone to know whether s/he is ‘in good conscience’ – especially when decision-making is set within a changing world where cultural values do not send a clear message because they are in so much flux? a. Made in the Image and Likeness of God There are, I think, several dimensions to Augustine’s understanding of the formation of conscience – not least of which is his emphasis on human beings as having been created with a basic moral compass or an inbuilt inclination toward the divine by the fact of having been created in the image and likeness of God. That emphasis is rather expansive insofar as Augustine has various ways of talking about the impact of having been stamped by God or by the Word of God (per Verbum impressa)28 with a sense for recognizing what is true and good.29 A significant part of Augustine’s thinking about Christian conscience, therefore, depends upon an acceptance of that which is deeply embedded within each human being. Yet, this ‘sense’ of the true and the good that is impressed on all at the time of creation can all-too-easily be burdened and even overcome by daily living. Cultivating the inner sense of that which is good and true by doing good and seeking the truth constitute the process of forming one’s conscience. That means that the formation of conscience is happening precisely though an ongoing dialogue with God and with neighbor. For Augustine, in other words, it is a matter of noticing one’s guilt in poor choices and noticing God’s grace in the good ones – a recognition that has to be followed by developing the habit of acknowledging God’s presence and confessing one’s guilt. Rather than an overly simplistic way of talking about the formation of conscience, it is a process that Augustine employed, both throughout his Confessions and in his preaching. Our soul groans until it reaches him, until the image of God stamped upon human beings is released by God himself. In these deep places God’s image, imprinted upon men and women at their creation, is so roughly tossed about and worn away by the onslaughts of the waves that, unless it is rescued by God and renewed and restored by him, it remains sunk in the depths forever, because although men and women were able to effect their own downfall, they cannot bring about their own resurrection. Yet even as they cry out from their deep place they begin to rise from it, for their very plea saves them from the most abysmal place of all.30 28 Cf. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos (en. Ps.) 32(3).16, 129.1; ss. 295.5, 302.3; Io. eu. tr. 40.9. 29 See J. Ratzinger, ‘Conscience and Truth’, Communio 37 (2010), 529-38. 30 En. Ps., ed. E. Dekkers and J. Fraipoint, CChr.SL 40 (Turnhout, 1990), 129.1: donec ad eum ueniat anima, donec ab illo liberetur imago ipsius, quod est homo, quae in hoc profundo tamquam assiduis fluctibus exagitata, detrita est: et nisi renouetur et reparetur a Deo, qui illam impressit quando formauit hominem (Idoneus potuit esse homo ad casum suum; non est idoneus

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The work of conscience, therefore, is neither entirely ‘within’ or ‘without’, but both ‘within’ and ‘without’! It is part of an ongoing dialogue with oneself and with one’s experience as well as with one’s neighbor and with God: ‘Let your conscience bear testimony to you, because it is from God’.31 It is also part of an ongoing dialogue with the Scriptures: ‘the divine scripture inwardly beckons us away from the boastfulness of this appearance outwardly, and from that surface which boasts in the presence of men it beckons us to what is within. Return to your conscience; question it’.32 And it is part of the everyday human interactions that characterize this life: ‘If you only love your brothers,33 you aren’t yet perfect. … Let each one examine his own heart. He shouldn’t bear hatred towards his brother because of some hard word, because of some earthly argument, lest he become earth. For whoever hates his brother may not say that he walks in the light. What did I say? He may not say that he walks in Christ’.34 Therefore, to say ‘love and do what you will’ is not just about love that is intended. It is an invitation to act as Christ acted, keeping love of the other in pride of place. b. ‘Love and Do What You Will’ That phrase has a dynamic quality for Augustine because it is, first and foremost, a way of living that recognizes that love is a gift from God. The verse from Paul’s letter to the Romans [‘The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.’] was often cited by Augustine – and cited in full nearly 50 times between the years 405 and 411,35 the period which is the primary focus of this article. That is one indication of the fact that, for Augustine, the predisposition to love is a gift of the Spirit. As gift, however, it does need to be nurtured. There is, in other words, a rather significant context to Augustine’s thinking when he says ‘Each one ought to examine his own conscience…’36 The inclination toward the divine is only a starting point, a gift that needs to be developed in habitual and human ways. ad resurrectionem suam), semper in profundo est; nisi liberetur, ut dixi, semper in profundo est. Sed cum de profundo clamat, surgit de profundo, et ipse clamor non eum permittit multum in imo esse. 31 Ep. Io. tr. 6.3: perhibeat tibi testimonium conscientia tua, quia ex deo est. 32 Ep. Io. tr. 8.9: ergo scriptura diuina intro nos reuocat a iactatione huius faciei forinsecus; et ab ista superficie quae iactatur ante homines, reuocat nos intro. redi ad conscientiam tuam, ipsam interroga. 33 That is, if you only love a restricted number or quality of people. Love has to be open to all. 34 Ep. Io. tr. 1.11: si fratres solum amaretis, nondum essetis perfecti … respiciat unusquisque cor suum: non teneat odium contra fratrem pro aliquo uerbo duro; pro contention terrae, ne fiat terra. quisquis enim odit fratrem suum, non dicat quia in lumine ambulat. Quid dixi? non dicat quia in Christo ambulat. 35 A.-M. La Bonardière, ‘Le verset paulinien Rom., V. 5 dans l’œuvre de saint Augustin’, in Augustinus Magister II (Paris, 1954), 657-65. 36 Ep. Io. tr. 3.4; see also 3.10: ‘A person should look to his conscience … if you heard something true, look to your conscience’ (unusquisque considerans conscientiam suam … si autem

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Therefore, to highlight the phrase ‘love and do what you will’ is not to suggest that any action can be approved as long as it was done with a proper, loving intention. It says rather that a person who is remade by the outpouring of the love by the Holy Spirit can literally do no wrong – as long as that person has, in fact, lived according to that gift. In that case, it is God’s action that informs the conscience and guarantees its decisions. Love alone, then, distinguishes between the children of God and the children of the devil. All may sign themselves with the sign of Christ’s cross; all may respond ‘Amen’; all may sing ‘Alleluia’; all may be baptized; all may go into the churches; all may line the walls of basilicas.37 The children of God aren’t distinguished from the children of the devil except by charity. Those who have charity have been born from God; those who don’t have it haven’t been born from God. This is a great indication, a great distinction. Have whatever you will, [but] if you don’t have this alone, nothing is of benefit to you. If you have nothing else, have this and you have fulfilled the law. For he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law (Rom. 13:8), says the Apostle. And charity is the fulfillment of the law (Rom. 13:10).38

Thus does Augustine measure all love in relational terms. The order of love (ordo amoris) is Augustine’s ‘brief and true definition of virtue’. We are meant to love everything in creation according to its proper relationship to God, that is, according to the order of God’s love. Each decision or focus of love is given the degree of love which is appropriate to it. The ordering of affections, therefore, is about prioritizing what is most and what is least important. Rather than say that something is bad, we learn to choose between what is good and what is better. That learning process never ends because every new relationship adds something new to the experience called life. Wisdom is not a quick ‘take’ but an accumulation of experience.

uerum audisti, conueni conscientiam tuam) and 6.2: ‘let us return to the testimony of conscience’ (reuocemur ad conscientiam) and 6.3: ‘Let your conscience bear testimony to you’ (perhibeat tibi testimonium conscientia tua) and 8.9: ‘Return to your conscience; question it’ (redi ad conscientiam tuam, ipsam interroga) and 9.4: ‘As long as righteousness hasn’t been accomplished, the conscience of sinners tortures their heart’ (torquet cor conscientia peccatorum, nondum facta est iustificatio). 37 Although Rettig translates these words similarly, he suggests that Burnaby’s rendering – ‘line the walls of the basilica’ – may make sense; i.e., people who throng to the basilicas press against their walls. 38 Ep. Io. tr. 5.7: dilectio ergo sola discernit inter filios dei et filios diaboli. signent se omnes signo crucis Christi; respondeant omnes, amen; cantent omnes, alleluia; baptizentur omnes, intrent ecclesias, faciant parietes basilicarum: non discernuntur filii dei a filiis diaboli, nisi caritate. qui habent caritatem, nati sunt ex deo: qui non habent, non sunt nati ex deo. magnum indicium, magna discretio. quidquid uis habe; hoc solum non habeas, nihil tibi prodest: alia si non habeas, hoc habe, et implesti legem. «qui enim diligit alterum, legem impleuit», ait apostolus: et, «plenitude legis caritas».

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c. Augustine’s Correlation of Heart and Conscience The moral decisions of conscience are not just a matter of mind and will for Augustine. In fact, he can use the words, heart and conscience, almost interchangeably. In spite of the tendency to ignore or exclude emotion in the moral decision-making process, therefore, conscience has been described as a ‘wholehearted commitment to the good and right’.39 Disregard for one’s feelings – no matter how unpredictable feelings can be – would be to ignore a significant dimension of moral decision-making by presuming that heart and mind are somehow separate from one another and to presume that emotions cannot ‘move us’ in the right direction. In fact, emotions are a ‘primary motivating system for all activity’, ‘infusing cognitive processing with subjective meaning,’ making ‘empathy possible’.40 They also make sure that we feel guilt when choices are not appropriate. In other words, personal investment in our own actions can happen when mind and heart are ‘in sync’ with one another, thus ensuring that we have a real awareness of being human. Conscience includes not only cognitive and volitional aspects, but also affective, intuitive, and somatic ones as well. We understand the moral conscience holistically as an expression of the whole self as a thinking, feeling, intuiting, and willing person. Conscience is the whole person’s commitment to value and the judgment one makes in the light of that commitment of who one ought to be and what one ought to do or not do.41

It is also clear that the separation of mind and heart is a clear path toward hardheartedness. Since compassion is a necessary dimension of interacting with others a neighbors, finding ways to develop ways of bringing mind and heart together is critical for having the kind of self-esteem that can learn from and work with others. d. A Focus on the Community Learning what moral responsibility is and what is required of anyone does not happen in isolation from the time, place and people along one’s path. Learning always comes about through human relationships. Everyone comes to know oneself in the presence of others – including the presence of God. Conscience is formed, therefore, within a human community where, over time, 39

S. Callahan, In Good Conscience: Reason and Emotion in Moral Decision Making (San Francisco, 1991), 95. Note that Augustine uses both ‘conscience’ and ‘heart’ to refer to this process, thus suggesting that the formation of conscience has to examine both the rational and the emotional dimensions of conscience – thus avoiding an historical inclination to think of conscience from a merely rational point of view. 40 Ibid. 41 Richard M. Gula, ‘The Moral Conscience’, in Charles Curran (ed.), Conscience: Readings in Moral Theology 14 (New York, 2004), 53. Emphases are his.

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attitudes and habits are developed that shape individual character as more or less intent on overcoming the human predisposition to selfishness. This relational dimension of human experience recognizes the role and impact of the surrounding community on the formation of conscience. Not only does an individual learn through the experience of the responsibility or the irresponsibility of others, but that experience is replicated over and over again – such that the community as a whole becomes more or less morally responsible. And – rather than simply a process of rational analysis – the experience as a whole develops in terms that affirm or diminish the experience of love. Conscience is formed, in other words, on the basis of both emotion and reason. The thought that it takes a village to raise a child – when applied to the formation of conscience – cannot be limited to children or to individuals. A growing sense of our interdependence is what matters and not simply concerns about individual freedom. Along with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (note 38) it can be affirmed that conscience is an ‘original memory’ of the good and true, but it is only realized in an active moral community where a person listens to her/his deeper self through reflection and healthy dialogue. In some beautiful way, we mediate God’s voice to one another by the way we speak and live.42 e. Inhibiting Factors In a time of jumbled values, the turn to individual decision-making may not itself be the most challenging problem for the formation of conscience. It is, however, a significant part of the challenge because it appears to be accompanied by a growing diminishment of trust among people – thus compromising a major component of forming a shared vision of that which is good and true. The suspicion with which people regard those who are ‘different’ in appearance inhibits real dialogue and understanding and, in that way, makes the development of moral community practices all the more difficult. The impact on conscience is all the more significant insofar as such division opens the way for clever, self-serving people and practices to gain ground – thus aggravating the challenge of developing trustworthy relationships and practices. The rather human inclination for people to protect themselves – whether by the accumulation of things, thus creating a comfort zone to live in or by surrounding oneself with like-minded people to avoid the tensions that come from differences in education, culture, or religion – also makes it more difficult for people to enter into relations of trust. Opportunities for being stretched by stepping outside of one’s comfort zone thus fail to happen, even on a sporadic basis.

42

See A.E. Ebido, ‘Conscience and Community’ (2014), 409.

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Yet, to work with and for the benefit of those who are forced by social or economic circumstances to live outside of their comfort zone increases the possibility of developing empathy for others – a major component of being able to engage mind and heart in the learning process. It thus becomes very difficult for anyone to grow beyond an initial set of beliefs and practices. The groupthink makes it less likely that anyone will have to face the realities that lead to doubt – a necessary component of growth – or to the kind of experiences that challenge systems of false security. It is, spiritually speaking, a way of setting up ‘gated communities’ to live in. A community without an active moral voice, where people are afraid to criticize the wrongdoings of its members, gradually experiences moral stagnation expressive in a spike in ‘self-interest’ that is often sort at the detriment of the ‘common-interest’ of all.43

If a community does not articulate its core values in a way that is inclusive and unifying, any efforts to form consciences will be inadequate – precisely because a shared vision of the common good44 is lacking. After all, every individual is in some way ‘community bound’. The failure to recognize the extend of mutual interdependence may be the most significant problem for any realistic effort for the formation of conscience – either one’s own or those of others.

43

Ibid. 408. ‘The idea of a good shared in common by a number of people, without diminishment to itself and without causing constriction or envy among its lovers, is a constant in Augustine’s writings.’ Raymond Canning, ‘Common Good’, in A. Fitzgerald et al. (eds), Augustine Through the Ages (1999), 219. 44

Teaching as a Form of Storytelling in De Magistro, Storytelling as a Form of Teaching in Confessiones Michelle FALCETANO, Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA

ABSTRACT In De Magistro, St Augustine explains that the art of teaching is accomplished by leading a student along a previously trod path of discovery. The effective teacher does not just tell the student where to go, but tells the story of how they personally found their way and how they understand themselves and their journey. In this way, all teaching is a kind of storytelling. In the Confessiones, Augustine plays this idea out in a multilayered fashion: he reflects upon his life in a series of personal vignettes through which he takes his reader as he goes looking for the light of the Inner Teacher within his memories, and he spends a great deal of time retelling the stories that served to guide him – stories in scripture, stories of his family and friends, and stories told to him by those going through their own journeys of discovery and conversion. What I propose to explore in this paper is the extent to which all teaching is a kind of storytelling, and all learning a kind of literary project that teaches us as much about ourselves as intersubjective interpreters as it does about any particular subject.

Introduction The general idea of teaching is that teachers use some manner of signification to pass some truth or idea into the mind of another person. The difficulty, of course, is that what teachers are attempting to convey necessarily exceeds the process of its mediation. Even the most trivial observation cannot be truly contained in a series of words or signs; instead, we can only point to the observation with a collection of images designed to inspire the minds of others to call up some more direct experience of that which we wish to convey. In De Magistro, Saint Augustine summarizes the process of teaching and learning thus: When the teachers have explained by means of words all the disciplines they profess to teach, even the disciplines of virtue and of wisdom, then those ‘students’ consider within themselves whether truths have been stated. They do so by looking upon the Inner Truth, according to their abilities. That is therefore the point at which they learn.1 1 Augustine, De Magistro (mag.), ed. W.M. Green and K.D. Daur, CChr.SL 29 (Turnhout, 1970), 14.45: at istas omnes disciplinas, quas docere profitentur, ipsiusque uirtutis atque sapientiae cum

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The teacher may explain something to the student, but unless their explanation prompts the student to undertake their own examination of the idea being conveyed, nothing is truly passed along. If a teacher’s explanation of a principle is unclear, or cannot be followed, the student’s Inner Truth will remain silent, and nothing will be learned. The teacher’s experience must be shared. What I argue here today is that this model of teaching comes to fruition as an act of storytelling, and that Augustine’s work in Confessiones ought therefore be analyzed through a framework that is expressly literary in order to understand not only the autobiographical elements of Augustine’s life, but also to understand the more philosophical and theological explorations of the soul, the self, human epistemology, what it means to be made in the image of God, and more. When I use the term ‘storytelling’, I am referring to the framing of ideas, events, objects, characters, and more into a sequential narrative with a coherent and consistent structure. According to J.R.R. Tolkien2, if this is done well, ‘what really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator”’, meaning that the storyteller does not transfer a series of plot points and character names into the mind of the audience, but rather ‘makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter’. Because the storyteller cannot create something out of nothing, the materials of the story are true things that the audience has experienced directly – places, people, or even simply colors, sounds, ideas, shapes, and more – rearranged in such a way that what is presented seems new, yet is consistent and understandable. If this Secondary World is going to ring true, then ‘Inside it, what [the storyteller] relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world’. The audience would ‘therefore believe it, while [they] are, as it were, inside’3. This is what I mean by ‘story’, regardless of whether it is fictional or based on something true. To apply this definition of storytelling to Augustine’s vision of teaching, the teacher invites their student into a Secondary World sub-created from the teacher’s own past experiences as a learner (learning, as it were, from the Inner Teacher). The story is thus designed to prompt the student to their own experience of learning. This world is ‘secondary’ to the student only temporarily, as they take their consideration inward for verification according to ‘the Inner Truth’. Although the student who has not yet discovered the particular combinations of ideas and images the teacher hopes to reveal must first step uerbis explicauerint, tum illi, qui discipuli uocantur, utrum uera dicta sint, apud semetipsos considerant interiorem scilicet illam ueritatem pro uiribus intuentes. tunc ergo discunt… English translation taken throughout is from Against the Academicians and The Teacher, trans. Peter King (Indianapolis, 1995). 2 J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘On Fairy Stories’, in The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston, 1984). In ‘On Fairy Stories’, Tolkien argues that writing and telling stories, particular fantasies and romances exercises our limited creativity in a way that puts us in touch with God. 3 Ibid. 132.

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out into this new intellectual landscape, in the end the student will find that the pathways revealed by the human teacher lead them back to the Inner Teacher. In the first section of this paper I will explore the theoretical basis for my argument as I find it laid out in De Magistro. In the second, I will turn to examples of Augustine putting this theory into practice in his Confessiones. Teaching as a Form of Storytelling in De Magistro The dialogue between Augustine and his son opens with an exploration into the purpose of speaking (roughly, ‘to inform and be informed’,4 and ‘to remind’), and ends with Adeodatus professing his love of Christ, the Inner Teacher. Along the way, the two explore the hyperbolic nature of words and language, working themselves into linguistic puzzles, jokes, and contradictions. Erika Kidd offers a compelling way into this discussion when she draws attention to the significance of the text in a ‘line of verse’ from Virgil’s Aeneid that Augustine asks Adeodatus to analyze. Although the line, spoken by Aeneas to Anchises, ‘If nothing from so great a city it pleases the gods be left…’ (Si nihil ex tanta superis urbe relinqui…),5 is presented as a random selection, Kidd argues that the significance is much greater. Says she: ‘In this quotation, the sum of the determinate realities signified by each word is far from the whole story about the speech offered from son to father’,6 and though the attempt to clarify what is signified in each word is, as she says, ‘instructive’, in the end ‘anyone familiar with the epic (Augustine chief among us) knows that Adeodatus, as he tries to identify what each word separately signifies, does not capture the multivalence of the words of Aeneas; he does not come close to plumbing the depths of their significance’.7 It is only through the fuller establishment of the context of the story that this significance comes to light. At the same time, however, the inadequacy of words can be accompanied by an uncognizable expansiveness. Augustine and Adeodatus discover this as they work their way through Virgil’s words, starting straight away with the very first word: ‘if/si’, which is often used in conditional and subjunctive clauses. Adeodatus says: ‘It seems to me that “if” signifies doubt’ which occurs ‘in the mind’.8 The doubt can be construed negatively, as Adeodatus seems to indicate, but it can also indicate some tacit positive meaning. The conditional form of the word may express hypothetical dependency or contingency, and the subjunctive may express some unrealized and potentially unrealizable possibility. We are only 4 I take this translation of aut docere, aut discere (Mag. 1.1.5) from Erika Kidd, ‘Making Sense of Virgil in de Magistro’, AugStud 46 (2015), 211-24, 212. 5 Mag. 2.3; the line comes from Virgil’s Aeneid, 2.659. 6 E. Kidd, ‘Making Sense’ (2015), 215. 7 Ibid. 217. 8 Mag. 2.3.

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one word into the verse; the next word, ‘nothing’ continues leading us into the hyperbolic power of story by giving us a productive – almost creative – vision of ‘nihil’. After some prompting from Adeodatus that because there is a sign for ‘nothing’ there must be something signified by it (ironically undermining its own existence as a sign), Augustine suggests that ‘this word [“nothing”] signifies a certain state of mind rather than the very thing that is nothing’,9 and they decide to move on. I, however, cannot. Here again we can see that while an ordinary sign can sometimes be directly linked back to what it is trying to show, it can also point deliberately to that which it is not. This takes us a step even further into confusion than the subjunctive/conditional did. With the word ‘if/si’, we have ontologically positive content to work with; we can at least rearrange phantasms torn from their ‘real’ context in experience into some more robust representation of the ‘thing itself’ that is represented by the words, whether it be material or not; that is, we can allow our minds the luxury of filling in the gaps in the story. With ‘nothing’, we have to deliberately contradict the existence of the sign. Without the fuller context of the story in which the focal sentence occurs, the actual words themselves simultaneously convey too much information, and very little. Let us move from the realm of deliberately subjective drama to the realm of ostensibly objective learning. Insofar as words are a medium by which to convey information, as Kidd explains, they ‘invariably fail to inform because we get knowledge from firsthand encounters with things, not from words’.10 To afford students access to the real ideas behind the words, then, ideally, teachers would wish to skip the messiness of the images (words) described above altogether and find a way for their students to experience the ideas directly; says Augustine in De Magistro: When we deal with things that we perceive by the mind, namely by the intellect and reason, we’re speaking of things that we look upon immediately in the inner light of Truth, in virtue of which the so-called inner man is illuminated and rejoices. Under these conditions our listener, if he likewise sees these things with his inward and undivided eye, knows what I’m saying from his own contemplating, not from my words … He’s taught not by my words but by the things themselves made manifest when God discloses them.11

Objective truth cannot be conveyed, and we are then left, at most, with some intersubjective experience to which we affix labels that come from general agreement and a hope that what we mean by each label is what our listener also means. Augustine says: When [students] inwardly discover that truths have been stated, they offer their praises – not knowing that they are praising them not as teachers but as persons who have been 9

Ibid. 2.3. E. Kidd, ‘Making Sense’ (2015), 219. 11 Mag. 12.40. 10

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taught, if their teachers also know what they are saying. Men are mistaken in calling persons “teachers” who are not, which they do because generally there is no delay between the time of speaking and the time of knowing; and since they are quick to learn internally after the prompting of the lecturer, they suppose that they have learned externally from the one who prompted them.12

But I do not think this means that the listener, or in the case of this paper, the student, is left to be alone. There is yet a benefit to speaking about such subjects: though we cannot be shown the light of truth by the inadequate words of the human teacher, we can be guided through common experiences to a place inside of our souls where the light of truth can shine unobstructed. While the words themselves are not the thing itself, words can have varying degrees of power in terms of the Secondary World they can be used to create by the skilled teacher or scholar. Even at the simplest level, such as when we use a word to name a visible object, we are using something so small and insignificant – a set of phonemes, syllables, etc. – to indicate the dynamic life of that object, existing in context and with concomitant properties that we must disentangle. While words by themselves are fraught with the simultaneous inadequacy and ‘too muchness’ described above, words can be combined to signify more than what is immediately present in any given object, acting as conceptual umbrellas that give shelter to what is potentially part of the unseen history of the object, as well as to universal truths in which that object participates. But in combination they can also narrow the context of that open possibility into a narrative stream that a student may encounter as a subjective experience. The effective teacher, then, leads a student to direct access to the truths in their own mind by sub-creating narrative interpretational schemes that go beyond simple revelation. When we are lost, or there is something we are overlooking, the human teacher can string together a collection of words or signs and symbols that can afford us a touchstone from which meaning can take shape in a subjectively narrative stream. This is why I say that teaching is a form of storytelling. It creates the conditions for the student to cultivate – or sub-create – a new experience of intellectual discovery by intersubjectively modeling the experience. For example, noted physicist Richard Feynman explains that even if different ‘ways of describing nature’ mathematically are all ‘equivalent scientifically’, they differ in a subjective way that is important: ‘psychologically they are different because they are completely un-equivalent when you are trying to guess new laws’.13 Some mathematical models are better than others at dealing with the unpredictability of the material world (Feynman contrasts the Euclidian model with the Babylonian, for instance, preferring the latter for research in physics, paying ‘but little attention to the precise reasoning from fixed 12 13

Ibid. 14.45. Richard P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (Cambridge, 2001), 53.

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axioms’14). In other words, even if there is ontological consistency between different mathematical models, that is, they are describing the same concept with accuracy; there can nevertheless be epistemological differences that hinge upon the sensory images used in various ‘interpretational schemes’.15 Our power to cultivate the intellectual imagination in mathematical physics is contingent upon our facility with the images we use to represent our claims. In other words still, the way we explain our learning process can affect our ability to discover previously unknown truths; the stories we tell ourselves about what we know can afford us greater or lesser access to the Inner Light of truth, and set the conditions necessary for us to have the direct experiences deemed necessary by Augustine and Adeodatus. It is important, however, to note that there are yet some cautions to take with this story-based approach to knowledge. Although I do not wish to dwell extensively on the potential contradiction between Augustine’s narrative practice and his struggles with his love of secular drama, it must be acknowledged that Augustine repented his love of Virgil, his tears for Dido, fearing the tempting power of the poets. The danger of getting caught up in dramatic tales is that we can be tempted down darker pathways that lead us away from the inner light of truth, perhaps more easily than we can be led toward it. We can fall for the illusions crafted by a talented storyteller because of the way they are presented, and the way the experiences they mimic make us feel. Augustine feared drama because he did not trust his conduit – his own soul. But the notion of treating teaching as a form of storytelling does not necessarily lead to this danger. Rather, I argue, it saves us from it. By considering all teaching as a form of storytelling, we are putting ourselves on guard against delusions of hubristic objectivity, shining light in the darker corners of our mind. It is a check on our assumptions. When George Santayana, in his essay ‘The Elements and Function of Poetry’,16 asks: ‘Why did Plato, after banishing the poets, poetize the universe in his prose?’,17 his answer comes readily: poetry, Santayana argues, affords us a ‘plastic moment of the mind, when we become aware of the artificiality and inadequacy of what common sense perceives’, what he calls ‘the true moment of poetic opportunity’.18 If we are to think of teaching as something pure and uncorrupted by falsehoods, we overestimate the power of words and make ourselves vulnerable to nominalism. There will always be something incomplete, and perhaps even illusory about our knowledge, because our knowledge is always a mere representation of 14

Ibid. 54. Ibid. 16 Essay collected in George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York, 1900). 17 Ibid. 270. 18 Ibid. 15

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some truth. We cannot have knowledge that is unmediated by our own minds. Even our most direct experiences are fleeting, and can only be known insofar as they can be recalled and re-presented to ourselves through some inadequate image. Even when we have clear, direct, and shared observation, what we learn from scientific inquiry is limited. Another modern figure, philosopher of mathematics Jacob Bronowski, is helpful here, although he is describing the way we accumulate material knowledge, rather than spiritual. Says he: ‘Therefore, when we practice science (and this is true of all our experience), we are always decoding a part of nature which is not complete. We simply cannot get out of our own finiteness’,19 and ‘we finish with something which is only a gigantic metaphor for that part of the universe which we are decoding’.20 Though the metaphor that makes up our understanding of reality may be limited, it nevertheless carries truth if it is well crafted: in its ‘true system’, in its glimpse of reality, and in its ability to advance us to new discoveries. But this limitation allows us to maintain the self-awareness we need to start again and move beyond a fictive determination. I cannot but think that if this is true of our knowledge of finite matter, it would apply even more to our knowledge of spiritual infinitude. When students are successful in learning something that can be verified by the light of truth, their own stories, as individuated subjects, go on, leaving behind the experience of discovery with their Inner Teacher. We can only hold onto those firsthand experiences by tearing them from our true experience of them and logging them in our memory by means of some representation, so we can take them along with us and share them with others. In some cases, this may require only a simple word, but often we need to work our way back through a complicated process of simple words strung together, pulling together various notions scattered in our memory. To see that knowledge again, we must retell and re-experience the story of our past discovery, becoming our own teacher. Without the ability to tell ourselves the story of our own previous learning experience, any direct experience of truth would slip away from us as soon as it ended, leaving us with less than ‘nothing’ – actual nothingness. This is the two-fold role of the teacher as storyteller: to put the inarticulable into words that somehow inspire the audience (which may include the teacher) to engage with that which goes beyond the words, and then use those words to anchor that experience within their minds, creating a world in which the student and teacher can find their way back to the ‘things themselves’ together.

19 20

Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (New Haven, 1978), 59. Ibid. 70.

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Storytelling as a Form of Teaching in the Confessiones In the Confessiones, Augustine plays this idea out in practice in a multilayered fashion. First, he reflects upon his life in a series of personal vignettes through which he takes his reader as he himself goes looking for the light of the Inner Teacher hidden somewhere within his memories, and second, he spends a great deal of time retelling the stories that served to guide him – stories in scripture, stories of his family and friends, and stories told to him by those going through their own journeys of discovery and conversion. While some of his exploration verges on the more contemplative and abstract, he is never impersonal or detached, and always, this process is one that begs for interaction with his reader, and also, of course, with God. Far from sequestering himself from others in order to learn from the Inner Teacher alone, Augustine constantly surrounds himself with human teachers: authors he studies, friends, his mother. He embraces the contextual complexity of his stories and theirs, never reducing them to simple objective truths, but instead taking them from their context in his life’s unfolding. Books I through IX of the Confessiones provide readers with a series of stories about Augustine’s life, accompanied by the emotions, judgments, and questions that plagued him as he worked through his memories. Obviously, though he is confessing to God, he is not going through the narrative details of his childhood for God’s benefit. In De Magistro, Augustine explains that words of prayer are not meant for communication with God, but to call to our own minds ‘the things themselves by means of the words’.21 The prayer itself is not for God, but for us, to ‘remind [us] of Whom [we] should pray to and of what [we] should pray for … in the inner recesses of the mind’. The same can be said for turning our memories into narratives by means of confession; our creative imagination can be put to use for our own ascent toward the ultimate truth. As Santayana explains: The great function of poetry … is precisely this: to repair to the material of experience, seizing hold of the reality of sensation and fancy beneath the surface of conventional ideas, and then out of that living, but indefinite, material to build new structures, richer, finer, fitter to the primary tendencies of our nature, truer to the ultimate possibilities of our soul.22

Augustine’s own conversion journey relies on such external materials to build his own relationship to the Inner Teacher; he is not convinced to be Christian by rational argument, but by exploring the objective re-applicability in subjective retellings of journeys already taken. In confession, Augustine narratively reconstructs the images in his memory into a Secondary World, and he 21 22

Mag. 1.2. G. Santayana, ‘The Elements’ (2009), 268.

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steps in this time as a stranger seeing the world with new eyes; in his first experience of many of his actions, he recalls feeling no guilt or qualm that would halt his activities. It is only in reflection that he comes to regret and vexation. This, however, helps him process his past as he moves forward, and in baptism, this confessional repentance changes him utterly. But this change only has meaning as a narrative, even if that narrative is held together by God and not our own faculty of memory: ‘From what starting-point and to what end have you led my memory to include even these events in my confession to you, when I have passed over much that I have forgotten?’.23 And this is true for not just his own stories; Augustine also makes special note of the conversion tales of his friends. Verecundus and Nebridius are each presented as analogs for Augustine’s own struggles with conversion, giving Augustine a chance to see his own struggles in stories secondary to his personal experience. Through Ponticianus, Augustine learns of the Egyptian monk Antony, whose life story, written by Athanasius of Alexandria, inspired two friends of Ponticianus to rethink their lives and purpose in the worldly arena of bureaucratic service. One of them, in reading the story of Antony, found his way to God. Ponticianus’ friend achieves the mental clarity and freedom he seeks in an effort to know Antony’s story – to enter a world that is secondary to his own, sub-created by Athanasius. From there, Augustine himself is likewise inspired: But while [Ponticianus] was speaking, Lord, you turned my attention back to myself. You took me up from behind my own back where I have placed myself because I did not wish to observe myself (Ps. 20:13), and you set me before my face (Ps. 49:21) so that I should see how vile I was how twisted and filthy, covered in sores and ulcers. And I looked and was appalled, but there was no way of escaping from myself.24

And, of course, there is no story more powerful for Augustine than the painful inventory he takes of his own life. Unlike Ponticianus’ friend, who found in his reading of the story of Antony a path to ascetic clarity, Augustine finds himself pointed back to his own story. I turn now to what I take to be the heart of Augustine’s narrative, in which he is simultaneously learning from story and acting as a storytelling teacher: the story of his mother’s life and death. Augustine begins with Monica’s childhood, for which he was obviously not present and must therefore have only 23

Augustine, Confessiones (conf.), ed. L. Verheijen, CChr.SL 27 (Turnhout, 1981), 9.7.16: unde et quo duxisti recordationem meam, ut haec etiam confiterer tibi, quae magna oblitus praeterieram? English translation taken throughout is from Saint Augustine: Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, New York, 1998). 24 Ibid. 8.7.16: narrabat haec Ponticianus. tu autem, domine, inter uerba eius retorquebas me ad me ipsum, auferens me a dorso meo, ubi me posueram, dum nollem me attendere, et constituebas me ante faciem meam, ut uiderem, quam turpis essem, quam distortus et sordidus, maculosus et ulcerosus. et uidebam et horrebam, et quo a me fugerem non erat.

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learned himself as a story, and one to which he has undoubtedly added much; this telling of Monica’s life is not merely a series of factual statements, but an analyzed retelling that is as influenced by Augustine’s love for his mother as it is by his knowledge of her life. This is not to say that he completely washed away her faults. It is well noted that although he speaks glowingly of her ability to discipline others to avoid the temptations of wine, she herself could not resist tasting from the casks when her parents sent her to fetch them some to drink. However, this is clearly included for narrative effect. Though he laments: ‘Where then was the wise old woman and her vehement prohibition?’,25 he is glad to follow this lamentation by turning back again to her goodness. The arc is clear – though Monica succumbs to temptation, she is saved by the grace of God, showing both His goodness and strength in redeeming her, and her goodness and strength in being open and willing to receive God’s redemption. But it is also notable that this redemption comes from Monica’s worldly companions. For her, God taught her through a maidservant who spoke harshly about her drinking habits. Although ‘The taunt hurt’, and was not intended by the maidservant to be helpful, Monica ‘reflected upon her own foul addiction, at once condemned it, and stopped the habit. Just as flattering friends corrupt, so quarrelsome enemies often bring us correction’.26 It is a cautionary tale with a clear moral, with many teachers: the maidservant, who led Monica to the Inner Teacher, Monica, who then led Augustine, and now Augustine, who aims to lead us in turn. Taken objectively, this leaves us with a series of interpretational layers that come together only at certain points of connection, with limited overlap and rather a lot of confusion about competing motivations and values. When these layers and connections are crafted into a subjective story, however, it becomes easier to work with. To think in terms of interconnecting narratives is to take some raw material and spin it into individual threads, such that we can weave the new threads into something useful or meaningful.27 The raw material itself, say for example, wool, is a chaotic mass, taken just as it is. This is how it is with objective truth, or direct experience of a truth. It is present to us, but if we do not first disentangle the raw material, we cannot reform it into something useable – we must pull the wool apart, gathering some bits together and leaving 25

Ibid. 9.8.18: ubi tunc sagax anus et uehemens illa prohibitio? Ibid. 9.8.18: quo illa stimulo percussa respexit foeditatem suam confestimque damnauit atque exuit. 27 For this metaphor, I take inspiration from the late Robert J. O’Connell, SJ. For Augustine, he says, human life is ‘a multicolored tapestry we behold most of the time from the wrong side; the threads too often run this way and that, a crazy tangle without seeming purpose or design. Only now and then does some great thinker, or painter, or dramatist come along to point at how the tangle might make sense, and how, when finally beheld from the correct side, the tapestry will show forth in all its solemn splendor’. Robert J. O’Connell, Imagination and Metaphysics in St. Augustine (Milwaukee, 1986), 59. 26

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some apart to create the fundamental threads, and then weave them back together by creating deliberate points of intersection. Think of how the initial story of Monica’s temptation to wine, taken as story, served Monica. Even as the agent of the change in the story (the maidservant) is left undeveloped (her thread ignored in favor of crafting Monica’s), some of her fibers were taken up into Monica’s as she passed through the protagonist’s life. The maidservant was not even necessarily aware of her role in Monica’s story (‘Even from the fury of one soul you brought healing to another’28). The result is that Monica’s life itself became an example to those around her who were able to take up some of her excess fibers into their own threads/stories. And in pulling many of these threads together to weave something that could become part of countless readers’ threads – something that would otherwise be lost – Augustine is able to shape something even grander and more interconnected, something historically shareable about love, faith, and how we need others. Through stories, Augustine tells of Monica’s modesty, her kindness, her wisdom, and how her example served to teach others. He credits her with Patrick’s (Augustine’s father) gentleness with her, though he was known to alternate between violent temper and kindness, and with his eventual baptism at his death. He credits her also with helping other women avoid the violence of their husbands by following her example, with reconciling differences and resolving disputes, all by serving as a living example of ‘patience and gentleness’. Says he: She was also a servant of your servants: any of them who knew her found much to praise in her, held her in honour and loved her; for they felt your presence in her heart, witnessed by the fruits of her whole way of life.29

Whether or not Monica was as saintly as she is portrayed is not necessarily important for Augustine’s purposes here. What we see in this story is the story that Augustine told himself, the story that he weaves into his own, and the story we are able to weave into ours. What we know is limited to what Augustine tells us – the image he presents of Monica’s life, which is itself an image that represents something good and Godly and true. What we can also see, however, is that although no one learns except by the Inner Teacher, human teachers like Monica can serve an invaluable role as a guide, providing points of intersubjective discovery that connect her to Augustine, Augustine to his readers, and his readers to each other as they discuss his story. Even if Augustine is idealizing his mother to some degree, he nevertheless comes across devoutly sincere in this idealization, and at my most skeptical I 28

Conf. 9.8.18: etiam de alterius animae insania sanasti alteram… Ibid. 9.9.22: erat etiam serua seruorum tuorum. Quisquis eorum nouerat eam, multum in ea laudabat et honorabat et diligebat te, quia sentiebat praesentiam tuam in corde eius sanctae conuersationis fructibus testibus. 29

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cannot help but be moved by not only the example of Monica’s narrative, but by Augustine’s loving portrayal of it.30 There is some manner of truth in both, something aspirational, and something that is directly relevant to Augustine’s desire for God and ascendant knowledge. He has chosen this version of Monica’s life to establish context for what is often assumed to be his – and her – utterly Platonic and mystical vision of God at Ostia. There is no strong transition from these images and details to philosophical theorizing; in fact, Augustine clearly establishes their shared situatedness on the day of the vision, noting their mortality, their bodies, their setting, the narrative motion, making the moment as present as possible for those of us reading: The day was imminent when she was to depart this life (the day which you knew and we did not). It came about, as I believe by your providence through your hidden ways, that she and I were standing leaning out of a window overlooking a garden. It was at the house where we were staying at Ostia on the Tiber, where, far removed from the crowds, after the exhaustion of a long journey, we were recovering our strength for the voyage.31

He paints a clear picture, establishing the world we are meant to enter for a short time. From there he moves into describing their conversation about the eternal lives of the saints, how from this moment, they feel no sacrifice in leaving behind the pleasures of the body for the ‘life of eternity’, the promise and possibility of which draws both Augustine and Monica up and out of the lower realms of being, taking his readers – his students – along with him on this journey of recollection: Our minds were lifted up by an ardent affection towards eternal being itself. Step by step we climbed beyond all corporeal objects and the heaven itself, where sun, moon, and stars shed light on the earth. We ascended even further by internal reflection and dialogue and wonder at your works, and we entered into our own minds. We moved up beyond them so as to attain to the region of inexhaustible abundance where you feed Israel eternally with truth for food. There life is the wisdom by which all creatures come into being, both things which were and which will be. But wisdom itself is not brought into being but is as it was and always will be. Furthermore, in this wisdom there is no past and future, but only being, since it is eternal. For to exist in the past or in the future is no property of the eternal. And while we talked and panted after it, we touched it in some small degree by a moment of total concentration of the heart. And we sighed and left behind us “the firstfruits of the Spirit” (Rom. 8:23) bound to that higher world, as 30

And throughout, he prays to God for guidance: ‘I bring my heart to you, Light that teaches truth. Let not my heart tell me vain fantasies’. Ibid. 13.6.7: sed quae causa fuerat, o lumen ueridicum, tibi admoueo cor meum, ne me uana doceat… 31 Ibid. 9.10.23: impendente autem die, quo ex hac uita erat exitura – quem diem tu noueras ignorantibus nobis – prouenerat, ut credo, procurante te occultis tuis modis, ut ego et ipsa soli staremus incumbentes ad quandam fenestram, unde hortus intra domum, quae nos habebat, prospectabatur, illic apud Ostia Tiberina, ubi remoti a turbis post longi itineris laborem instaurabamus nos nauigationi.

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we returned to the noise of our human speech where a sentence has both a beginning and an ending.32

His understanding of self, come to him through his connection to Monica, delivered by ‘noise of our human speech’, brings him at last to what he desires – to know God by standing in the presence of wisdom. It is important to note that both he and Monica stand in the presence of wisdom not in any sense alone, but together, as two individual knowers, acting as each other’s teachers. And in turn, Augustine uses this story to teach us, his readers, something incredibly important about the intimacy of shared knowledge and intersubjective discovery of truth, by creating a Secondary World into which we might step with him and Monica. He cannot teach us the truths that they encountered, but in telling their story he can give us a path to follow such that we might find our way to some higher knowledge.

32 Ibid. 9.10.24: … erigentes nos ardentiore affectu in «id ipsum» perambulauimus gradatim cuncta corporalia et ipsum caelum, unde sol et luna et stellae lucent super terram. et adhuc ascendebamus interius cogitando et loquendo et mirando opera tua et uenimus in mentes nostras et transcendimus eas, ut attingeremus regionem ubertatis indeficientis, ubi pascis Israhel in aeternum ueritate pabulo, et ibi uita sapientia est, per quam fiunt omnia ista, et quae fuerunt et quae futura sunt, et ipsa non fit, sed sic est, ut fuit, et sic erit semper. quin potius fuisse et futurum esse non est in ea, sed esse solum, quoniam aeterna est: nam fuisse et futurum esse non est aeternum. et dum loquimur et inhiamus illi, attingimus eam modice toto ictu cordis; et suspirauimus et reliquimus ibi religatas «primitias spiritus» et remeauimus ad strepitum oris nostri, ubi uerbum et incipitur et finitur.

Lest Loves Compete: Saint Augustine’s Theology of Charity Fr. David Vincent MECONI, S.J., Saint Louis University, St Louis, MO, USA

ABSTRACT Augustine has no problem inverting the Johannine claim that ‘God is love’ (1Jn. 4:8), letting his parishioners and interlocutors understand that ‘love is God’ as well. For Augustine, there is therefore no ‘human’ or ‘created’ love, i.e., faint simulacra which imitate what in the end will turn out to be true charity. If love is God’s very essence, then true love is precisely where God and the Christian virtues bind created persons into a deifying union with God and with each other. This is why love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable. In that convergence, Augustine will make clear that it does not matter where one starts – whether with love of God or with love of neighbor – as each will necessarily overlap. True love never terminates in just one ‘other’: to love the Father means to love the Son and to love the Son inevitably leads to love of neighbor; conversely, one cannot love one’s neighbor without being loved by the Triune God, and without allowing his love to be appropriated into one’s own life and thus become the glue that unites us to others forever.

A few days before my mother died in the summer of 2012, I walked into her room and she was in tears. I asked her if she was okay. ‘No’, she said. ‘Are you in pain?’ ‘No’, she said. ‘Then, what’s the matter, mom?’ ‘I don’t want to leave you kids, and I know that must disappoint Jesus’. At this moment my mother had made an unfortunate but understandable error. If for even a second, she believed that if she was going to show Jesus how much she loved him, she could not let on how much Jesus’ people meant to her. Here lied a faithful woman, a lifelong daily communicant, a woman whose decades of widowhood were filled with prayers and charitable works, and she was all too tempted to believe that her God was a jealous lover. We read the story of Lazarus and talked about what even Jesus’ tears might mean. We prayed and my mother’s heart was recalibrated and refreshed, leaving this world knowing that the only way to love God rightly is to love those whom God loves. In her magisterial exploration into the many issues surrounding Christian theodicy, my friend and colleague here at Saint Louis University, Eleonore Stump, coins the term ‘stern-minded attitude’ to characterize a strand of spirituality in the Christian tradition that is inimical to true human excellence. The stern-minded are those who live for ‘God alone’, to the point of deprecating

Studia Patristica CXVI, 75-90. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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the created order and ultimately denying the desires of their own heart in order to ingratiate themselves with their God. That is, this type of believer presumes that if they are going to impress their creator, they can never let on how much his good creation has ever meant to them. In Wandering in Darkness, Professor Stump thus writes that these stern-minded tend to ‘think of flourishing as a relationship to God … a good too great to be commensurable with other goods. On the stern-minded attitude among religious believers, if God provides this good for a human person, then that is or ought to be enough for that person’. She then goes on to provide a sort of genealogy of stern-mindedness. She catalogs such denial of human desires with John Cassian’s story of Patermutus who allows his little 8-year-old son to be berated and beaten by monks so as to prove his love for Christ, the religious novice who is told that her love of God should equip her not to mourn over the loss of her own earthly parents, and so on.1 The problem with such stern-mindedness, as Stump makes convincingly clear, is that love is forced to compete against love. This was my mother’s temptation at the end of her journey here. It is the mindset that one’s love for God is proven, for example, by denying one’s love for anything that is clearly not God. Yet our Lord himself united these two loves into one, and that in the best of the Christian tradition, the only way to love God ‘whom we cannot see is to love the neighbor whom we can see’ (1Jn. 4:20). This essay turns to the writings of Augustine of Hippo in order to show how his theology of charity never asks that love compete against love. Augustine seemingly grows in his appreciation for the unity of charity and came to see that one cannot really love God unless one is willing to love those whom God also loves: while still immersed in the pursuits of his career and advancement, Augustine of Hippo coldly sent away the mother of his son so he could pursue – in his selfish eyes – a more noble love. But Augustine, like most of us, eventually grew up and produced a theological vision which can teach us that eternal charity can begin with one’s natural affections, and that in our seemingly mundane love of neighbor begins the eternal love of God. Aurelius Augustinus was born to a Christian mother and a staunchly Roman pagan father in Thagaste, Numidia in the year 354, and would spend most of his life – dying in the year 430 – in what today is Algeria. Thanks to his innovative writing and the composition of his Confessiones, the highlights as well the low points of his well-chronicled life are known by most: Augustine excelled in his studies, he won many prizes for Latin oratory and went on to teach rhetoric. He joined a new age cult and through those connections, at the age of thirty years old, he found himself employed by the emperor himself up in Milan surrounded by all the carnality the western capital could offer. No stranger to 1 Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford, 2010), 423.

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the allures of the world, Augustine himself admits that he fell headlong into empty loves while selling ‘the service of my tongue [in] the market of speechifying’.2 But while employed as the imperial orator, a kind of head of propaganda for the emperor, he also came into contact with the great Bishop of Milan, Ambrose, who introduced him to the true meaning of the Christian scriptures and assisted him in his reading of Platonic philosophy. On the Easter Vigil of 386 AD, Augustine presented himself and his teenaged son for holy baptism. Thereafter he returns to Africa to begin a nearly forty-year career as priest, bishop, and wildly prolific theologian. By limiting our concerns to those places where Augustine comments on God’s nature as charity, this essay proceeds in three main sections. First, we shall see how love fuses otherwise disparate individuals into a living unity. This is the goal of love, to unite lover and beloved in what Augustine names the totus Christus, the whole Christ wherein God himself dwells and can therefore be found in those he loves. Second, we turn to Augustine’s reading of 1Jn. 4:8 – that God is Love – and see how it evolved over the decades as he matured as a pastor of souls, thus enabling him to assert – rather daringly so – if God is love, then love must also then be God. The third section, then, will be to appreciate the implications of Augustine’s liberal view of love – namely, what it might mean for our own hearts and how we live out the two great commands – to love God and to love neighbor.

The Totus Christus: Love as Identifying Communion Augustine’s theology of love is characterized by two very important images: (1) motion out of oneself and (2) transformative identification into the beloved. First, love begins with one’s coming out of oneself, imagined by Augustine in various metaphors: as a weight drawing one into the other – pondus meum, amor meus, as he so famously writes.3 Yet Augustine also describes love as feet, pedes, as wings, alae; but it also has hands and of course a desirous heart. As such, the first instance of love is always ecstatic, propelled out of itself to its beloved. Second, love not only moves toward the other, in a way it also becomes the other. Eros begins in ecstasy but leads to a transfiguration of the lover into the beloved, the beloved into the lover. ‘What is every love?’ Augustine wonders in his very early work De ordine, ‘Does it not consist of the will to become one 2 Augustine, Confessiones (conf.), ed. L. Verheijen, CChr.SL 27 (Turnhout, 1981), 9.2.2: ministerium linguae meae nundinis loquacitatis… English translation taken throughout, unless otherwise noted, from The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (WSA). The Confessions, I/1, trans. Maria Boulding, ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, 1997). 3 Conf. 13.9.10.

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with the object which it loves; and, when it reaches its object, becomes one with it?’4 Is this perhaps not the most important question any created person can ask: What do I love? What ought I to love? This is the essential inquiry because it alone determines not only one’s true character but one’s eternity as well. As such, it proves to be a most beautiful and poetic aspect of Augustinian charity, and it is a moment all lovers have known. It is the Inkling’s Charles Williams to his wife Mary Wall when questioning his care for her, ‘Love you? I am you’.5 Or it is Catherine’s affirmation to Nelly in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights that her love for Heathcliff has changed her forever and that while, My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don’t talk of our separation again: it is impracticable.6

While a less Victorian age may dismiss such prose as overly saccharin or romantically utopian, one can see this same dynamic throughout the best and oldest of Christian literature. Think back to one of the first post-biblical homilies we have – delivered on a Holy Saturday, probably somewhere in modern-day Syria, and surely sometime in the early second century. We hear a bishop describe Christ’s descent into hell to retrieve our first parents and thus all who had come from them. He preaches: The Lord approached [Adam and Eve], bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of the him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out: ‘The Lord be with you’. Christ answered him, ‘And with your spirit’. He then took him by the hand and raised him up, saying, ‘Sleeper, awake, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light’. Out of love for you and for your descendants I now by my own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth, all who are in darkness to be enlightened, all who are sleeping: Arise! I order you, O sleeper, awake! I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you, and together we form only one person and we can never again be separated.7

In Augustine’s preaching the imagery varies from this very eastern and ancient homily, but the dynamic of love is the same. While preaching on the 4 Augustine, De ordine (ord.), ed. W.M. Green and K.D. Daur, CChr.SL 29 (Turnhout, 1970), 2.18.48: Nonne unum uult fieri cum eo, quod amat et, si ei contingat, unum cum eo fit. My translation. 5 C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York, 1991), 95. 6 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Hertfordshire, 1992), 59. 7 Translation, slightly adjusted, from Best Sermons Ever, ed. Christopher Howse (New York, 2001), 11-2; this ancient homily is also available at http://www.vatican.va/spirit/documents/ spirit_20010414_omelia-sabato-santo_en.html.

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First Letter of John in the year 407 AD, for example, we hear Augustine worry that where his congregants find their hearts is also where they will find themselves forever: Each person is as his or her love. Do you love the earth? You will be earth. Do you love God? What shall I say? Will you be God? Listen to the Scripture, for I dare not say this on my own [and then quoting Ps. 81]: You are gods, and sons and daughters of the Most High, all of you.8

This is a rather startling claim – love transforms us, either into earth or into gods! But as both our ancient anonymous author as well as St Augustine knew, this is the point of the Incarnation: love longs to become like its beloved, to form one person out of two, and in his perfect charity, the Son of God became human, so humans could become divine! This great exchange of natures, God’s humanity for our divinity, never remains some dry dogma for Augustine, but is most often used as a reflective exercise in asking his parishioners to look honestly at who they are becoming. Instead of holding up the world or their sins as the supposed reflection of who they are, their Bishop instead holds up the person of Christ before those present and invites them to see their truest worth: Now, however, I wonder if we shouldn’t have a look at ourselves, if we shouldn’t think about his body, because he is also us (quia et nos ipse est). After all, if we weren’t him, this wouldn’t be true: When you did it for one of the least of mine, you did it for me (Matt. 25:40). If we weren’t him, this wouldn’t be true: Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? (Acts 9:4). So we too are him, because we are his organs, because we are his body, because he is our head, because the whole Christ (totus Christus) is both head and body.9

The ‘whole Christ’ he preaches, a term, the totus Christus, Augustine himself coined sometime in the mid-390s AD while composing his lengthy commentary on the Book of Psalms. Here in these 150 songs of Israel’s praise, Augustine found Christ singing, praying, lamenting and loving his Father. The words of the Psalmist become Christ’s because Christ is the one human whose lips alone can offer true praise, the one whose words alone can forgive sinners, the one whose cry from the 8 Augustine, In epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus (ep. Io. tr.), PL 35, 2.14: quia talis est quisque, qualis eius dilectio est. terram diligis? terra eris. deum diligis? quid dicam? deus eris? non audeo dicere ex me, scripturas audiamus: ego dixi, dii estis, et filii altissimi omnes. English translations, slightly adjusted, taken throughout from WSA. Homilies on the First Epistle of John, I/14, trans. Boniface Ramsey, ed. Daryl E. Doyle and Thomas Martin (Hyde Park, 2008). 9 Sermo (s.), PL 38, 133.8: iam uero si nos ipsos attendamus, si corpus eius cogitemus, quia et nos ipse est. nam etsi nos ipse non essemus, non esset uerum, «cum uni ex minimis meis fecistis, mihi fecistis». si nos ipse non essemus, non esset uerum, «Saule, Saule, quid me persequeris?» ergo et nos ipse, quia nos membra eius, quia nos corpus eius, quia ipse caput nostrum, quia totus Christus caput et corpus. English translations taken throughout from WSA. Sermons, III/4, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. J.E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, 1992).

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Cross can assure sinners that even there, God is near. One strong occurrence of such identification comes early on at Ps. 26 where Augustine sees in David’s chrismation the anointing of all of Israel, all of God’s faithful. Augustine comments: … uniting us into one body with himself and making us his members, so that in him we too are Christ (in illo et nos Christus essemus) … From this it is obvious that we are the body of Christ, all being anointed. In him all of us belong to Christ, but we are Christ too, because in some sense (quodammodo) the whole Christ (totus Christus) is Head and body.10

The Augustinian “whole Christ” began when the Son of God assumed to himself the fullness of humanity, the New Adam who has re-gathered all men and women now into his own self. We hear such lines often from Augustine’s Jesus: ‘in him we too are Christ’ (in illo et nos Christus essemus), ‘in me they too are I’ (in me etiam ipsi sunt ego).11 Reflecting on such lines, we see how Augustine commits himself to the view that Jesus of Nazareth is also the mystical Messiah who in his perfect humanity has re-gathered all the exiled children from Eden. The baptized are now his body in and through whom the divine head continues to reach out to others. Such convergence effects a mutual indwelling, Christ and Christian, which allows the Lord to be incessantly born, toil, be persecuted and crucified and even rise each day in his members. This is a humbling facet of love as Augustine sees it; the Lord humbly prolongs his incarnation in his members. Over and again this Christ life continues – in a baptismal font, in an earnest prayer, in an act of holy communion, God and humanity once more become one. Now each of the baptized is elevated and transformed to live a divinely adopted child’s life, enabled through grace to become another Christ, an arresting phrase which Augustine employs to describe this mutual indwelling. For any faithful follower of Christ ‘also becomes a member by loving, and through love he comes to be in the structure of Christ’s body, and there shall be one Christ loving himself’.12 This theology of indwelling frees Augustine from worrying about where this love should commence: love of God leads inevitably to love of neighbor and love of neighbor is impossible without the love of God. For without God as the 10 Enarrationes in Psalmos (en. Ps.), ed. E. Dekkers and J. Fraipoint, CChr.SL 38-40 (Turnhout, 1990), 26(2).2: concorporans nos sibi, faciens nos membra sua, ut in illo et nos Christus essemus … inde autem apparet Christi corpus nos esse, quia omnes ungimur; et omnes in illo et Christi et Christus sumus, quia quodammodo totus Christus caput et corpus est. English translation taken from WSA. Expositions of the Psalms, III/15, trans. M. Boulding, ed. J.E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, 2000). Emphasis added. 11 In Iohannis euangelium tractatus (Io. eu. tr.), ed. R. Willems, CChr.SL 36 (Turnhout, 1990), 108.5. 12 Ep. Io. tr. 10.3: et diligendo fit et ipse membrum, et fit per dilectionem in compage corporis Christi; et erit unus Christus amans seipsum; trans. Ramsey, 148.

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love who unites created persons, we cannot truly love one another, but only grasp outward from our own impoverished, craving need to control another, but without loving one another, we cannot ever say truly that we love God. Augustine therefore goes on to ask: How can that be, when you love Christ’s members? When you love Christ’s members, then, you love Christ; when you love Christ, you love the Son of God; when you love the Son of God, you also love his Father. Love, then, cannot be separated. Choose for yourself what to love; other things come to you as a result. Should you say, ‘I love God alone, God the Father’, you are lying. If you love, you don’t love one thing alone, but, if you love the Father, you also love the Son … [and] if you love the head, you also love the members … God’s Church itself.13

Here we have our first real indication of how Augustine understands love: dilectio non separari potest – love ought not be separated. Due to Augustine’s insistence that love never terminates exclusively in another but brims over into others, love of God and love of neighbor form more of a continuous circle than a discardable ladder on which we use creatures to climb to God and then are asked to abandon them once we have attained our divine destination. In his reading of 1Jn. 4:8 and that God is love, Augustine found scriptural warrant for this position, for his refusal to worry about the starting point of charity, God or neighbor. Let us now turn to this very unique reading of sacred scripture. 1Jn. 4:8 — If God is Love, is Love God? Very early on in his theological career, Augustine was careful to separate two kinds of competing loves: love of God and love of anything else. In his initial work against the Manichean sect to which he had belonged for 9 regrettable years, for example, he asserts that, ‘God alone should be loved, but this whole world, that is, all sensible things, should be held in contempt’.14 Statements like this from the 380s and 390s AD are numerous, words of a man seriously wounded by the world, a Catholic Christian convert now leery of returning to his former ways, one who has found the pearl of great price and is unwilling to let it ever again out of his grasp. For in his first years of attempting to live the Christian life, Augustine does seem to exhibit a kind of other-worldly faith 13 Ibid. 10.3: quomodo, quando membra Christi diligis? cum ergo membra Christi diligis, Christum diligis; cum Christum diligis, filium dei diligis; cum filium dei diligis, et patrem diligis. non potest ergo separari dilectio. elige tibi quid diligas; sequuntur te cetera. dicas, deum solum diligo, deum patrem. mentiris: si diligis, non solum diligis; sed si diligis patrem, diligis et filium … si enim diligis caput, diligis et membra … ipsa est ecclesia dei. Emphasis added. 14 De moribus ecclesiae Catholicae et de moribus Manicheorum (mor.), ed. J.B. Bauer, CSEL 90 (Wien, 1992), 1.20.37: amandus igitur solus deus est; omnis uero iste mundus, id est omnia sensibilia contemnenda… English translation taken from WSA. The Manichean Debate, I/19, trans. Roland Teske, ed. B. Ramsey (Hyde Park, 2006).

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that forces him to deny the desires of their hearts, with the misplaced belief that his love of God just might render him immune to the vicissitudes of fortune that cause heartbreak. Had Augustine himself become stern-minded? For a time, I believe so, understandably. His newly embraced Christian faith acted as asbestos protecting him from the vulnerability and demands of love. Is this not something oftentimes encountered in Christian converts still today? The zeal of their fresh identity seeks to distance itself from their former ways. Augustine had lived a dissolute life, he confesses to having struggled with the empty pleasures of carnal lust and worldly fame in particularly, he knows he has caused scandal and has led others astray. Very likely this is why in his late 30s Augustine still seems hesitant to ascribe anything other than the divine nature as worthy of what we can safely call love. In 393 AD Augustine – a young and promising priest, ordained not even two years prior – is invited to preach to the bishops of North Africa gathered at the general Synod of Hippo. In his discourse Augustine naturally and easily turns to the topic of God as love, and for the first time in his public career looks at 1Jn. 4:8, that God is love. Before these attending bishops Augustine was adamant that the Apostle John wrote that God is love (1Jn. 4:8) because he also wanted simultaneously to teach that clearly love is not God: ‘John does not say that love is God but that God is love, so that’ Augustine insists, ‘the divinity itself is understood to be love’.15 Imagine the scene: the brightest as well as the most mischievous kid in his class returns to his homeland and is asked to address the leading bishops in his recently embraced Church. For the first time Augustine of Hippo, a man who left these shores with a concubine and small child – now both gone – went to work for the emperor at the recommendation of Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, enemy of the great Ambrose and perhaps the highest-ranking pagan of his day. Augustine realizes he is known to this collection of ecclesial dignitaries as someone who spent almost a decade as a professed enemy of Christianity, but who is now able publicly to defend the sincerity of his love for Christ and his Church. Perhaps desirous of showing how all earthly eros and worldly desire has been eradicated in him, the relatively new convert zealously pronounces that scripture quite clearly holds how God alone is love, so God alone can be loved. Yet almost fifteen years later, both Augustine’s interior life as well as the demands of his public office had changed considerably. By the year 407 AD he has proven himself a successful and faithful bishop, he has spent countless hours listening to the pains and the promises of thousands of simple believers, 15 De fide et symbolo (f. et symb.), ed. J. Zycha, CSEL 41 (Vienna, 1900), 9.19: etiam hic enim non ait dilectio deus est, sed: «deus dilectio est», ut ipsa deitas dilectio intellegatur. English translation taken from WSA. On Christian Belief, I/8, trans. Michael G. Campbell, ed. B. Ramsey (Hyde Park, 2005).

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he has preached, heard confessions and spent long days adjudicating civil court cases. So the next time he turns back to comment on this same passage of First John, he not only inverts the taxonomy here but even attributes this reversal to the Evangelist himself. In his In epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus, delivered in the Easter season of 407 AD, we accordingly hear: How, then, could it be a short while ago, Love is from God, and now Love is God? For God is the Father and Son and Holy Spirit. The Son is God from God, the Holy Spirit is God from God, and these three are one God, not three gods. If the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God, and he loves him in whom the Holy Spirit dwells, then love is God, but it is God because it is from God.16

In this fifteen-year gap between Augustine’s exegesis of 1Jn, he has now come to a place where he can state that if God is love, love is God. We again see how the mutual indwelling of the Holy Spirit assures us that what we wish to call love will be God’s essence (est Deus; 1Jn. 4:8) as well as that movement from and back to God (ex Deo; 1Jn. 4:7). This is a position which only grows in the following decades. In a homily dated 419 AD, for instance, we again hear how to love and to be loved is a gift of the Holy Spirit and ‘So entirely is love or charity the gift of God that it is even called God, as the apostle John says: Charity is God, and whoever remains in charity remains in God and God in him’.17 Notice how Augustine now actually attributes this inversion to the Apostle himself, a convenient slip when he is advancing a rather intriguing innovation. This ‘daring inversion’ has already been noticed by two of the great scholars of Augustine of recent memory, Tarcisius van Bavel, O.S.A. and Roland Teske, S.J.18 But what our study might add to their indispensable studies, is to notice how Augustine has matured as a pastor and curator of the human condition. He passes his days counseling and listening, seeing how his congregants love their children and boast about their grandchildren. The residual guilt of misusing his heart and his intellect has subsided, his interaction with the Christian families and farmers of the Mauritanian plains has opened his eyes to the holiness of all loves. The mature Augustine is no longer afraid of two competing kinds of loves, one Christian and one carnal. By now he sees that there is only one love, 16 Ep. Io. tr. 7.6: quomodo ergo iamdudum, «dilectio ex deo est»; et modo, «dilectio deus est»? est enim deus pater et filius et spiritus sanctus: filius, deus ex deo; spiritus sanctus, deus ex deo; et hi tres unus deus, non tres dii. si filius deus, et spiritus sanctus deus, et ille diligit in quo habitat spiritus sanctus: ergo dilectio deus est; sed deus quia ex deo. 17 S. 156.5: caritas usque adeo est donum dei, ut deus uocetur, apostolo Ioanne dicente, «deus caritas est, et qui manet in caritate, in deo manet, et deus in eo». 18 T.J. van Bavel, ‘The Double Face of Love in St. Augustine – The Daring Inversion: Love is God’, Studia Ephemeridis ‘Augustinianum’ 26 (1986), 69-80; Roland Teske, ‘Augustine’s Inversion of 1 John 4:8’, AugStud 39 (2008), 49-60. Mention here should also be made of Raymond Canning, The Unity of Love For God and Neighbor in St. Augustine (Heverlee, Leuven, 1993).

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God, and so whether one starts with the divine or with the human has been legitimized. This one love progresses from God to God’s people with such clarity and circularity Augustine can unabashedly encourage his flock with the gentle encouragement that in loving one another truly, they are inevitably loving the Christ: ‘Let us love each other, and we love Christ’.19 Obviously Augustine no longer fears that what is to be properly considered charity can replace God, for it is God. In fact, he tells his congregation, ‘Love him; whatever you love, it comes from him’.20 Not one to shy away from dramatics in the pulpit, oftentimes rehearsing imaginary conversations between believers, drawing from concrete situations from their careers and experiences in town and on the farm, Augustine the orator uses a rather common experience from the dusty streets of Hippo to make a theological point: the exchange between a learned pagan and a new Christian. In a sermon on the Feast of the Lord’s Ascension, he has to come to terms with the fact that the incarnate and visible Son of God is now seated at the Father’s right hand. He cleverly depicts a non-Christian interlocutor who challenges the neophyte’s recently received Creed who in turn responds, ‘You’re saying to me, “Show me your God”, but I’m saying to you, “Pay a little attention to your heart”. “Show me your God”, you say. But I say: “Attend a little to your heart”’.21 But in his heart (of course!) the pagan finds all sorts of sin and filth and thus shies away from the God of the Christian who, however, uses this moment of true fear to teach that, God is too much for you; but God became man. What was a long way away from you has come down right next to you through a man. The place for you to stay in, that’s God; the way for you to get there, that’s man. It’s one and the same Christ, both the way to go by and the place to go to.22

In this exchange, we can appreciate a bigger piece of theology than just a missiological method in how to witness to nonbelievers. We see how Augustine understands how most of us have come to love God by first loving humanity. In other words, he has come to appreciate how the human heart, regardless of geographical nationality or the diversity of personal experience, desires the same end – immortality and joy. That is why his famous line at the opening of 19 S. 229N:1 (= Guelf 16:1): amemus nos, et Christum amamus. English translation taken from WSA, III/6, trans. E. Hill, ed. J.E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, 1993). 20 S., ed. C. Lambot, SPM 1 (Utrecht, Brussels, 1950), 261.4: ama illum: quidquid amas, ab illo est. English translations taken throughout from WSA, III/7, trans. E. Hill, ed. J.E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, 1993). 21 S. 261.5: tu mihi dicis: ostende mihi deum tuum. ego tibi dico: adtende paululum ad cor tuum. ostende, inquis, mihi deum tuum. adtende, inquio, paululum ad cor tuum. 22 S. 261.7: multum est ad te deus: sed homo factus est deus. quod longe erat a te, per hominem factum est iuxta te. ubi maneas, deus est: qua eas, homo est. idem ipse Christus, et qua eas, et quo eas.

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his Confessiones is in the singular: our heart is unsettled, unquiet, cor nostrum inquietum – our heart is restless until it rests in Thee, O God. The Christian and the non-Christian have the same heart. This proves to be the locus of evangelization or, as he will preach on another occasion, when you want to teach others of Christ, point them to what gives their hearts pleasure, in whom they find delight. Quoting his first intellectual mentor, the Latin poet Virgil, Augustine uses what would be a familiar line to his Latin congregation, ‘Each one is by his pleasure drawn’, from Virgil’s Second Eclogue (§65). Once again leading this flock into deeper reflection on their commitments, obligations, and daily joys, the Bishop of Hippo continues that, … those whose delight is in the truth, whose delight is in happiness, whose delight is in justice, whose delight is in eternal life, are drawn to Christ, because each of those is Christ … Give me a lover, and he will know by experience what I am saying here. Give me a man of desires, give me someone who is hungry, give me someone traveling thirsty through this wilderness, and panting for the fountain of eternal life, and he will know what I am saying.23

In this way Augustine would have moments of evangelization begin not in lofty dogma but in the desires of the heart, insisting that the Roman and the Christian seeks the same goal of joy, of knowing and being known, loving and being loved. ‘Give me a lover’, Augustine cries, assured that true charity cannot help but elevate the lover into Love himself. For that reason the formerly suspicious Augustine has come to understand how most of us have come to love. Was it not by gazing upon a smiling face appearing over our cribs? Was it not the love of a mother which incorporated us into the mysteries and levels of charity and care, the love of friends as we grew, the love of a spouse and our own children in whom we found our own hearts expanding? So while the love of a creature may be chronologically and often even emotionally prior, the love of God must be ontologically and formatively prior. It is one and the same love but experienced by creatures appropriate to our maturation and life’s unfolding. But there is a caveat and a caution along the way. We hear often from the Bishop’s pulpit, that we must love bene – love well or correctly – if what we consider to be love will, in the end, be worthy of the name: If you recognize it, God is love (1Jn. 4:8.16). So if you have been drinking love, tell me what place you have drunk it in. If you recognize it, if you have seen it, if you love it, what do you love it with? After all, whatever you love rightly (Quidquid enim bene 23 Io. eu. tr. 26.4: trahi hominem ad Christum, qui delectatur ueritate, delectatur beatitudine, delectatur iustitia, delectatur sempiterna uita, quod totum Christus est? … da amantem, et sentit quod dico. da desiderantem, da esurientem, da in ista solitudine peregrinantem atque sitientem, et fontem aeternae patriae suspirantem, da talem, et scit quid dicam.

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amas, caritate amas), you love with love. And how can you love anything with love if you don’t love? So if you love it, what do you love it with … That’s how you must learn to love God.24

Identify love with God’s essence carries obvious expectations. We must love well, virtuously. In fact, one could easily check such movements with, say, St Paul’s characteristics of charity in 1Cor. 13: Love is patient, love is kind, love is never self-seeking, and so on. The truth of the matter for Augustine is that love is an all or nothing event: we either love one another with God’s very self which therefore necessitates such love will be unwaveringly virtuous, chaste, and fruitful, or we are bound to one another out of our own fallen fabrications. That is, the glue between each is either the Holy Spirit, or it is our own interior poverties – fear, control, lust, or manipulation. Either we have only a tenuous and fleeting connection that death will surely destroy, or we are together as one forever. Concluding Implications of Augustine’s Theology of Charity The first major impact Augustine’s understanding of the way love ‘works’ is in how we should realize that all of our loves originate from and are oriented toward God. So, while charity may be experienced at first as only human, as we grow we hopefully realize the true source of our loves is Love himself. Coming to realize this is also to understand that the Creator and the creature are two distinct realities, the love of the latter always grown and gauged by one’s love for God and the keeping of God’s commandments. Augustine’s most quoted scriptural verse – nearly 500 occurrences throughout his corpus is Rom. 5:5 – ‘the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us’ – because it captures perfectly this simultaneous truth that love is God and comes from God. This schema of co-inherence, then, must necessarily begin with God’s gift to his creatures. And God does this by convincing those creatures that they matter to him and are invited into an eternal espousal. De cathecizandis rudibus, or On Teaching Beginners the Faith – composed sometime around 400 AD – Augustine makes a beautiful claim and tells his catechists that they are to teach those preparing for baptism that, … before all else (maxime propterea), Christ came so that people might learn how much God loves them, and might learn this so that they would catch fire with love for 24 S., ed. C. Lambot, CChr.SL 41 (Turnhout, 1961), 23.13: si nosti illam, «deus caritas est». si ergo caritatem bibisti, dic mihi in quo loco bibisti. si nosti illam, si uidisti illam, si amas, unde amas? quidquid enim bene amas, caritate amas. quomodo autem caritate aliquid amas, qui caritatem non amas? ergo si amas, unde amas? … sic disce amare deum. English translation taken from WSA, II/2, trans. E. Hill, ed. J.E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, 1990). See also s. 261.4.

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him who first loved them, and so that they would also love their neighbor as he commands and shows by his example.25

Love is God’s first transformative gift to his creatures. In Christ, the divine nature is made accessible and offers other humans a burning love, pure fire enabling them first to receive God’s charity and then bring that same love to others. As an eternal dance of indwelling (what the Greek Fathers called the perichoresis of the Trinity), love never terminates in another. This is why Augustine can ask, ‘Do you want to discern the character of a person’s love? Notice where it leads’ – if it leads to God, it is caritas; if it leads back to oneself, it is cupiditas.26 The second factor flows from this view of charity: to love God means loving what and how God loves. Love does not ethereally elevate, but plunges the lover into a world of moral ordering; love has expectations, it has demands. First and foremost, love demands that one’s heart be submitted to God the Father as one of his beloved children. Natural affection is limited to biology and time, and in very strong language Augustine echoes the Gospels telling us to hate our mother and father, son and daughter, but not obviously because they are deserving of hate, but when we love in that way only, we are loving merely extensions of our own needy selves. Augustine writes in his early work De uera religione, I mean, it is more inhuman to love a man not for being a man but for being your son. For this means not loving in him what belongs to God but loving what belongs to you. Small wonder, then, if you don’t get to the kingdom of heaven, seeing that you love what is personal and private to you and not what is common to all.27

This challenge to love others not simply as my child or my spouse but as God’s child, God’s mystical bride, is magnificently captured at the end of C.S. Lewis’ haunting short work on the afterlife, The Great Divorce. Lewis writes of a grieving mother who lost her young son years ago and now wants to go to heaven herself so she can once again be with her little Michael. In a rather painful passage to read, Lewis wants to teach us that all natural affection and biological instinct is what he calls a ‘germ of desire for God’ 25 De cathecizandis rudibus (cat. rud.), ed. M.P.J. van den Hout et al., CChr.SL 46 (Turnhout, 1969), 4.8: maxime propterea Christus aduenit, ut cognosceret homo quantum eum diligat deus, et ideo cognosceret, ut in eius dilectionem a quo prior dilectus est inardesceret, proximumque illo iubente et demonstrante diligeret… English translation taken from WSA. Instructing Beginners in the Faith, I/10, trans. R. Canning, ed. B. Ramsey (Hyde Park, 2006). 26 En. Ps. 121.1: sed uis nosse qualis amor sit? uide quo ducat. English translation taken from WSA. Expositions of the Psalms, III/20, trans. M. Boulding, ed. J.E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, 2004). 27 De uera religione (uera rel.), ed. K.D. Daur and J. Martin, CChr.SL 32 (Turnhout, 1962), 46.88: magis enim est inhumanum non amare in homine quod homo est, sed amare quod filius est. hoc est enim non in eo amare illud, quod ad deum pertinet, sed amare illud, quod ad se pertinet. quid ergo mirum, si ad regnum non peruenit, qui non communem, sed priuatam rem diligit. See also Io. eu. tr. 41.8.

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which our Lord uses to pique our awareness of and desire for him. It cannot stay merely human because love is not, in the end, human. Love is divine, for love is God’s immanent self as well as his gift to those whom he calls. To make this point, Lewis composes this scene: Pam, the mother, tells the angel: ‘Well, never mind. I’ll do whatever’s necessary. What do you want me to do? Come on. The sooner I begin it, the sooner they’ll let me see my boy’. ‘But, Pam, do think! Don’t you see you are not beginning at all as long as you are in that state of mind? You’re treating God only as a means to Michael’. To which Pam retorts: ‘You wouldn’t talk like that if you were a Mother’. ‘You mean, if I were only a mother’, the angel responds. ‘But there is no such thing as being only a mother. You exist as Michael’s mother only because you first exist as God’s creature. That relation is older and closer. No, listen, Pam! He also loves. He also has suffered. He also has waited a long time’.28

If the first lesson in love is that it is a gift of God, the second lesson must be this: there are no natural loves. Natural love will in the end wither and fade, not worthy of the name ‘love’ after all; however, natural love eventually consecrated in Christ is in the end the supernatural life of God himself gluing his faithful into eternal ecclesia. Consequently, we must be free wondering whether we love another too much or if we might perhaps be tempted to thinking we love too many people – love is eternal, love is infinite and the more we appropriate charity, the more it advances. The third point to consider is how love of neighbor is the visible growth and gauge of one’s love for God. The acid-test of our loving the invisible God is the virtue we show toward visible persons. To make this case this, Augustine pulls off a fancy Latin word play by telling us that love is truly love only when it is undefeatable and it is undefeatable, invicta, only when it is not ficta or merely contrived affection: ‘But only then can virtue be undefeated in these trials, when charity is genuine and not pretended. So the one who gives us real virtue is the one who pours out charity into our hearts’.29 Again Rom. 5:5 is the consistent and incessant image Augustine needs to discuss love: charity is God, it proceeds outward as a gift, it is God, and it is what glues together God’s people into one forever. In this way he can insist that loving God and neighbor are practically synonymous: ‘those two commandments are found to be so interrelated that it is not possible for a person either to have love of God without loving his neighbor, or to have love of his neighbor without loving God’.30 28

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York, 1996 [1946]), 90-1. S., PL 38, 304.4: sed tunc potest in istis esse uirtus inuicta, si non sit caritas ficta. ille ergo dat nobis ueram uirtutem, qui diffundit in nostris cordibus caritatem. English translation taken from WSA. Sermons, III/8, trans. E. Hill, ed. J.E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, 1994). 30 De fide et operibus (f. et. op.), ed. J. Zycha, CSEL 41 (Vienna, 1900), 10.16: duo ista praecepta ita ex alterutro conexa reperiuntur, ut nec dilectio dei possit esse in homine, si non diligit proximum, nec dilectio proximi, si non diligit deum. English translation taken from WSA. On Christian Belief, I/8, trans. Ray Kearney, ed. B. Ramsey (Hyde Park, 2005). 29

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But what is freeing is not that love of God and love of neighbor are connected, but that Augustine allows, if not insists, love for fellow creatures is not a separate kind of love than one’s love of Jesus Christ, but an entrée into understanding what eternal love is. There is not a secular and a sanctifying love. It’s a challenge to love those who irritate and anger us; it is all too convenient to love a God who is distantly seated well above our streets, or off comfortably in a tabernacle: ‘You are all looking forward to greeting Christ seated in heaven. Attend to him lying under the arches, attend to him hungry, attend to him shivering with cold, attend to him needy, attend to him a foreigner’.31 The fourth and final point for our time together is how Augustine refuses to divide loves into holy and mundane. There are neither two sources nor two sorts of love. There is, Augustine preaches, only ‘one charity’ – una caritas – but expressed in two precepts (duo praecepta): love of God and love of neighbor.32 In his opening encyclical, Pope Emeritus Benedict – an Augustinian scholar par excellence – likewise insisted that there be one love and that if … an antithesis (between human and divine love) would ever be taken to extremes, the essence of Christianity would be detached from the vital relations fundamental to human existence, and would become a world apart, admirable perhaps, but decisively cut off from the complex fabric of human life. Yet eros and agape – ascending love and descending love – can never be completely separated. The more the two, in their different aspects, find a proper unity in the one reality of love…33

One cannot read these words of Benedict and not appreciate his awareness that we are not simply made to love God as one who demands all of our fealty and affection. For the complex fabric of human life is precisely where a Godmade-flesh would be. How often I think of this each week as I walk into our local children’s hospital to celebrate Mass where I am privileged to witness modern day pietas of mothers holding their ailing children. This is a holy scene, a holy moment where maternal affection and divine hope coalesce, and this is the kind of seamless theology of charity Augustine himself wants to advance. It is, in the words of George Eliot describing young Adam Bede’s newly found affection for the beautiful yet flighty Hetty Sorrel, it is a love: … which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to be greater and better than himself. Love of this sort is hardly distinguishable from religious feeling. What deep and worthy love is so? whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our 31 S. 25.8: expectat unusquisque uestrum suscipere Christum sedentem in caelo. attendite illum iacentem sub porticu, attendite esurientem, attendite frigus patientem, attendite egenum, attendite peregrinum. See also s. 239.6-7. 32 S. 265.9. 33 Deus Caritas Est §7; retrieved Jan 8, 2020 from http://www.vatican.va/content/benedictxvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est.html.

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tender pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies, all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty: our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love of its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.34

From Emily Bronte to George Eliot, from C.S. Lewis to Pope Emeritus Benedict, we see how once again so much of our highest understanding of love is anchored in the pastoral work of St Augustine. For Augustine is among the first in our great tradition to realize that love is one and that all love is ultimately divine. He also knew better than most that what one can initially call love is in the end unworthy of the name; Augustine knew first-hand how we can all be deluded, especially in our early years, into thinking our craving for companionship, our libidos, our fallen relishing of controlling another really is charity. Keeping these nearer voices in our ear, let us conclude with one final selection from a homily Augustine himself delivered centuries before Benedict and in a world apart from 19th-century England, but yet captures the desire of the human heart to love and be loved forever: We must be united to his body so that there may be only the one Christ who both descended and ascended. The head came down, but he went up with his body; he went up clothed in the Church, whom he made ready for himself, free from spot or wrinkle (Eph. 5:27). Did he ascend alone? Yes, in a way, but not without us, as long as we are so closely united with him that we are members of his body. He is alone, yet he is with us, forming one person, and one for ever.35

In this one person, true human dignity is realized; in this one person, there is no room for the so-called stern-minded. For here all are to be loved with the very same charity who is God.

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George Eliot, Adam Bede (Oxford, 2008 [1839]), 34. En. Ps. 122.1: uniri corpori ipsius, ut sit unus Christus, qui descendit et adscendit. descendit caput, adscendit cum corpore; uestitus ecclesiam suam, quam sibi exhibuit sine macula et ruga. solus ergo adscendit. sed et nos quando cum illo sic sumus, ut in illo membra eius simus; et nobiscum solus est, et ideo unus, et semper unus. Emphasis added. 35

Love of and for the Martyrs: Resurrected Wounds and the ‘Order’ of Restoration Sarah STEWART-KROEKER, University of Geneva, Switzerland

ABSTRACT In De ciuitate Dei 22.12, Augustine affirms that Christ rose with the marks of the wounds on his body. He later writes that although in the resurrection all deformity will be removed, our affection for the martyrs leads us to want to see the scars of their wounds on their resurrected bodies, as we see Christ’s. The martyrs’ wounds, unlike ordinary human wounds, have a beauty ‘in the body and yet not of the body’ (ciu. 22.19). In this paper, I explore how love alters the significance of the martyrs’ wounds. This seems to reflect both the love of the martyrs’ for Christ and believers’ love for the martyrs. Love’s acts on earth may alter the resurrected bodily form, which Augustine otherwise anticipates following a certain order of restoration that includes the erasure of wounds and other ‘deformities’. I examine how the re-ordering by love of the resurrection’s ‘order’ of bodily restoration in the case of the martyrs inflects the ordering of earthly desire in the sense that Augustine claims we want to see the martyrs’ wounds on their heavenly bodies.

In De ciuitate Dei 22.12, Augustine affirms that Christ rose from the dead with the marks of his wounds on his body. A few sections later, he writes that although in the resurrection all deformity will be removed, Now we feel such extraordinary affection (nescio quo autem modo sic afficimur amore) for the blessed martyrs that in the kingdom of God we want to see on their bodies the scars of the wounds which they suffered for Christ’s name; and see them perhaps we shall. For in those wounds there will be no deformity, but only dignity, and the beauty of their valour will shine out, a beauty in the body and yet not of the body.1

In the context of book 22’s lengthy account of the resurrection, this is a remarkable speculation: in Augustine’s account of the resurrection, the rhetorical force of his appeal to the resurrection’s desirability as a doctrine rests 1 Augustine, De ciutate Dei (ciu.), ed. B. Dombart, CChr.SL 47-8 (Turnhout, 1955), 22.19: nescio quo autem modo sic afficimur amore martyrum beatorum, ut uelimus in illo regno in eorum corporibus uidere uulnerum cicatrices, quae pro Christi nomine pertulerunt; et fortasse uidebimus. non enim deformitas in eis, sed dignitas erit, et quaedam, quamuis in corpore, non corporis, sed uirtutis pulchritudo fulgebit. English translation taken throughout from The City of God against the Pagans, trans. H. Bettenson (London, 2003).

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on both the strength of human dismay over the corruption and decay of the body (over time and in injury or death) and human love for the body in health and beauty. He addresses a detailed set of questions about how the body will be restored from various corruptions at significant length, and overall, he insists that wounds, and the scars of wounds, are among the many deformities that will be healed in the resurrection. For the most part, Augustine’s appeal to the doctrine of the resurrection emphasizes the fullness of the resurrected body’s liberation from all marks of corruption and from the suffering that attended its earthly life. Yet he speculates that perhaps the marks of the wounds will remain on the martyrs’ bodies. Further still, he says, we want to see them – because these are unlike other wounds. Unlike other wounds, whose disfiguring marks will be effaced in the resurrected body ‘in those wounds there will be no deformity’. The substance of this claim seems to rest on the idea that love changes the significance of the martyr’s wounds. This re-signifying love is two-fold: the martyr’s love for Christ (which entails their wounding) and the believers’ love for the martyrs (their ‘extraordinary affection’). The martyrs’ love for Christ and the believers’ love for the martyrs re-signify the martyrs’ wounds. There are a number of implications to be drawn from this exceptional claim to a wounded remainder on the martyrs’ bodies. First, however, I will elaborate the theological structures that underlie Augustine’s claim.

Responsive Imitation Integral to the re-signifying power of these loves is a structure of responsive imitation. First, in the martyrs’ love for Christ: the martyrs suffer wounding unto death for Christ’s name, which is both responsive to Christ’s own suffering death for love and imitative of Christ’s acceptance of death. Because the martyrs suffered these wounds for Christ, these wounds will be dignified and beautified by the martyrs’ valour, just as Christ’s wounds are beautiful in that by love for humanity, he suffered deformity to heal broken human beings. Christ’s love displayed in his crucified limbs and torn side invites an answering love.2 As Augustine writes, ‘Christ’s deformity was our beauty’, because ‘his deformity 2 ‘Why do we love him? What are we loving when we hear that he suffered for us (1Pt. 2:21)? Crucified limbs? A torn side? Or his charity? Yes: charity falls in love with charity! He loved us in order to win our answering love, and to empower us to love him in return he came to us in his Holy Spirit’. Enarrationes in Psalmos (en. Ps.), ed. E. Dekkers, CChr.SL 40 (Turnhout, 1956), 127.8: quam rem amamus in Christo? membra crucifixa, latus perforatum, an caritatem? quando audimus quia passus est pro nobis, quid amamus? caritas amatur. amauti nos, ut redamaremus eum; et ut redamare possemus, uisitauit nos spiritu suo. English translation taken from The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century. Expositions of the Psalms III/20, trans. Maria Boulding, ed. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, 2004).

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forms you’.3 This is nowhere more apparent, it would seem, than in the martyrs’ sacrificial deaths for love of Christ and the resulting ‘beauty without deformity’ of their wounds. The imitation of Christ’s sacrificial love in the martyrs’ suffering for love of Christ is presumably a key theological premise for Augustine’s extension of the resurrected scars to the martyrs. Yet this is not the reason explicitly given for Augustine’s suggestion that the martyrs’ wounds, or scars of wounds (Augustine uses both terms4), might remain on their bodies. He ties the claim rather to the believers’ affection for the martyrs and the desire to see their wounds. This, and not a principle of imitation, initiates the speculation – ‘see them perhaps we shall’. If the martyrs’ responsive imitation of Christ is part of the theological premise for their resurrected wounds, we may infer that there is a parallel between the believer’s presumed desire to see Christ’s wounds and the believer’s desire to see the martyrs’ wounds. This parallel is of course partial, for the beauty of Christ’s crucified deformity is the direct display of salvific sacrificial love, while the martyrs’ wounds respond to Christ’s. The martyrs’ wounds enact a testimony to the power of faith in and love for Christ. They are a kind of earthly (and, as Augustine suggests, perhaps heavenly) reflection of what imitation of Christ in this most extreme form entails, a visible representation of the formation that Christ’s deformity effects, rendering humans beautiful in his image through his deformation in death. It is worth noting that all believers are all called to respond to Christ’s sacrifice by sacrificing their broken hearts, by acts of compassion which Augustine calls ‘true sacrifices’, the discipline of their bodies, the kindling of their souls by the fire of love such that they become sacrifices to God, such that the whole ecclesial community formed by these sacrificial acts is ‘offered to God as a universal sacrifice, through the great Priest who offered himself in his suffering for us’.5 3 Sermo (s.), ed. C. Lambot, CChr.SL 41 (Turnhout, 1961), 27.6: deformitas Christi te format … deformitas illius pulchritudo nostra erat. 4 Ciu. 22.19: in illo regno in eorum corporibus uidere uulnerum cicatrices … sed si hoc decebit in illo nouo saeculo, ut indicia gloriosorum uulnerum in illa immortali carne cernantur, ubi membra, ut praedicerentur, percussa uel secta sunt, ibi cicatrices, sed tamen eisdem membris redditis, non perditis, apparebunt. This is interesting in itself, in that the idea of a wound itself on the resurrected body implies a transformation of the significance of a wound: a wound, presumably, remains open – an opening in the skin that otherwise marks a boundary (if a porous one) between the inside of the body and the world it inhabits – in a way that a scar is not, and yet a resurrected wound is no more subject to infection or corruption and decay than a scar. In the earthly life, if the body is generally susceptible to infection, disease, corruption, decay, and morality, a wound incurs a heightened susceptibility to infection, corruption, and death. In the resurrected body, none of these aspects of corruptibility apply, and yet a resurrected wound remains open in a way that a scar does not: Christ’s wounds remain, at least in his appearance to the disciples before the ascension, open to penetrating touch. 5 Ciu. 10.6: uniuersale sacrificium offeratur deo per sacerdotem magnum, qui etiam se ipsum obtulit in passione pro nobis.

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Martyrdom falls within this register of sacrificial responses to Christ’s sacrifice, which encompasses a broad range of responsive acts, both inward and invisible (the sacrifice of the broken heart) and outward and visible (ecclesial rituals of baptism and Eucharist).6 Nevertheless, the martyrs are special exemplars of human responses to Christ’s suffering love: they exemplify imitative responsiveness to Christ’s sacrificial love. So the relationship between the believer and Christ’s wounds and the believer and the martyrs’ wounds creates a kind of triadic structure that hinges on the interplay of imitation, exemplarity, and responsiveness, which are integral to the relational sinews that hold together the body of Christ. Earthly Acts and the Alteration of the Resurrected Body The force of Augustine’s suggestion that the martyrs’ retain their wounds lies in the claim that earthly human acts (and not only Christ’s!) may alter the resurrected bodily form. This suggestion is striking in the context of Augustine’s otherwise detailed elaboration of the order of the full restoration of the heavenly body, freed from all marks of its earthly ‘imperfections’. In De ciuitate Dei 22, Augustine goes through a series of objections, questions, and concerns about the resurrection of the body and in so doing, constructs a series of principles for the restoration of the resurrected body. First he addresses questions about abortions and infants – that is, prematurely deceased bodies.7 This discussion opens onto questions about the maturity of the body more generally, as well as its stature and girth.8 He deals next with questions about sex, where he importantly affirms that resurrected bodies are sexed, both male and female, although their sexual parts no longer serve the purpose of reproduction and will have a ‘new beauty’ in heaven.9 From here, he moves into questions about the perishable parts of the body like hair and nails, the principles of non-disfigurement (precluding either excess or deficiency), the preservation of substance, the principles of harmony, proportion, and beauty that will guide the restoration of the resurrected body to spiritual perfection.10 For Augustine, disfigurements and disintegrations of the body will in no way preclude the full and unblemished restoration of the resurrected body. Augustine addresses both disfigurement through injury and illness and the disintegration of the body in death – bodies that have been consumed by fire, wild animals, 6 See Eugene R. Schlesinger, ‘The Sacrificial Ecclesiology of City of God 10’, Augustinian Studies 47 (2016), 137-55 for a detailed discussion of this sacrificial core of Augustine’s ecclesiological thought. 7 Ciu. 22.13. 8 Ibid. 22.14-6. 9 Ibid. 22.17: decori nouo. 10 Ibid. 22.18-21, 24, 30.

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or other human beings as well as bodies that have been disintegrated by water (regarding deaths in shipwrecks). In general, and Augustine spends a good deal of time speculating how, he affirms the unmarked restoration of the body, whatever disfigurement or disintegration it may have suffered in its earthly life and death. It is in the context of his discussion of the principles of harmony and non-disfigurement that he opens up the possibility of the exceptional remainder of the martyrs’ wounds and scars of wounds. Christ’s and the martyrs’ earthly wounds are the only exception to the order of restoration he otherwise anticipates. Their wounds are excepted because of what they signify and because this significance transforms their appearance – these are wounds without deformity. Indeed, they are beautiful wounds. But Augustine qualifies their beauty by saying that they have a beauty in the body but not of the body. In this sense, Augustine resists glorifying wounded bodies as such. The martyrs’ wounds are, of course, embodied, but their beauty lies in their spiritual significance. This re-signification of wounds, in the martyrs’ case, inflects the ordering of love in the earthly life. Augustine’s lengthy treatment of questions and concerns about the restoration of the resurrected body indicates that he presumes that we want to see perfectly harmonious, beautiful bodies healed of all possible excess, deficiency, defect, wounding, scarring, and so on.11 The point I want to emphasize here is that the re-signification of wounds inflects the ordering of desire. Because of these wounds’ particular spiritual significance, Augustine suggests that we want to see them, whereas (he assumes) we otherwise do not want to. In fact, his discussion of the resurrected body in De ciuitate Dei 22 indicates that he thinks we very much want reassurance that any disfigurement and disintegration to which our bodies may be subject will not compromise the resurrected body. Augustine’s affirmation that it might be possible for one’s actions in the earthly life to affect the restoration of the resurrected body, at least in this one particular case, raises a number of implications that he himself does not elaborate. If the martyrs’ suffering for love of Christ should be understood in relation to the range of responsive sacrificial love to which all believers are called, perhaps we might affirm that a range of love’s embodied acts, specifically of sacrifice, might re-signify the beauty of the restored body.12 When Augustine affirms that the martyrs’ may retain the marks of the wounds they suffered for Christ, this implies that the ordering of love and 11 I note in passing that this raises complicated questions about how we relate to and value our earthly bodies, precisely in what Augustine sees as their imperfections or disfigurements, what kinds of aesthetic standards are being applied and to what extent we might want to question those, and most importantly, it raises very serious questions in relation to bodily disabilities. These are all serious concerns that require thinking through whether and to what extent one would want to endorse Augustine’s account of these desires, his account of heavenly bodily perfection, and their normative implications for earthly bodies. Such a discussion exceeds the scope of this paper. 12 This coheres with Eugene R. Schlesinger’s account of the sacrifice as the ‘integrative horizon’ of ecclesial existence. E.R. Schlesinger, ‘Sacrificial Ecclesiology’ (2016), 151-5.

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restoring of the body are dynamically responsive to the significance of what we do with those bodies in love. Just as the order of love is better understood as the ordering of love, the way love moves us, the way we move according to loves, in real, embodied acts in the world, so too, the restoring of the body is responsive to love’s embodied acts. There is thus a continuity of the earthly and heavenly body not just in form, according to certain principles of bodily substance, unity, harmony, etc., but – in this case – in the very marks of love’s acts in the world. An earthly act of sacrifice may alter the order of heavenly restoration. The Desire to See To conclude, let us return to the desire to see these wounds of the martyrs. I have made a couple of suggestions regarding the theological premises for why Augustine thinks we might want to see these wounds, notably in terms of the imitation of Christ and the structures of exemplarity and responsiveness embedded in his understanding of moral formation. But there are many ways in which Augustine thinks believers are called to imitate Christ, and only this particular instance (the martyrs’ wounding) implies a possible alteration of the resurrected body – so what is the substance of this desire to see these particular wounds? As evoked above, the content of the martyrs’ particular and exemplary imitation of and responsiveness to Christ hinges on sacrificial love. Christ’s wounds are the signs of his loving sacrifice and they invite an answering love, which is embodied in a range of acts that Augustine calls sacrifices. We may infer that the force of the desire to see the scars of the wounds relates to the significance of embodied earthly love responsive to Christ as sacrificial. In the earthly life, loving Christ involves responding sacrificially to his sacrifice. In perhaps the closest physical analogy to Christ’s sacrifice, the martyrs’ give their bodies unto death as a testament to their faith in and love for Christ. In another sense, however, the analogy to Christ’s sacrifice is closer in cases of sacrifice made for love of other human beloveds.13 While the martyr’s death is a kind of act of sacrificial testimony, responsive to Christ’s love, we might think of sacrificial acts for love of others as more closely analogous to Christ’s sacrifice. And so I wonder whether the affirmation of the martyrs’ beautified resurrected wounds might, in fact, be extended to other acts of sacrificial love that incur injury, wounding, or death, insofar as the believer loves Christ in loving others. Importantly, sacrifice is an embodiment of love, in this life.14 We love in the midst of a world haunted by loss and affliction and violence, but also simply 13 In ciu. 10.6 Augustine explicitly ties sacrificial responsiveness to God as a sacrifice of the heart to the outward acts of charity toward the neighbor. 14 As Schlesinger writes: ‘Three intertwined themes run through and inform this discussion of sacrifice then: (1) the interior disposition of charity, which is the reality at the heart of sacrifice;

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competing goods, which often require parting from one good for the sake of another. But more fundamentally, in a world haunted by sin, offering broken hearts to God (also enacted in participating in the Eucharistic sacrifice) and acts of charity to neighbors are ways of healing those hearts and fragmented bonds between human beings in order to cleave to God and to bind the human ecclesial community together. In heaven, precisely these conditions are all removed: there will be no loss, no grief, no violence, no conflict between goods. Expressions of heavenly love – as Augustine often articulates in lavish terms – are characterized by abundance and excess and infinitude. Significantly, then, the scars of earthly wounds suffered for love of Christ would be a visible mark and remainder of earthly sacrificial love. Yet sacrifice is not the only sign (sacramentum) of love – for Augustine, delight is another. It is significant that Augustine affirms that resurrected bodies, no longer subject to decay and whose harmonious functioning will be fully displayed, ‘will kindle our rational minds to the praise of the great Artist by the delight afforded by a beauty that satisfies the reason’.15 The ‘beauty in but not of the body’ that he attributes to the martyrs’ resurrected wounds, we may infer, thus belongs to this beauty that satisfies reason (in its representation of the sacrificial unity of the entire body of Christ) and in so doing affords delight. Augustine’s affirmation regarding the martyrs’ wounds weaves the visible marks of love – in sacrifice and in delight – together in a way that reflects a kind of inverse relationship between sacrifice and delight in relation to earthly and heavenly life. Earthly life and love are marked by brokenness and loss and thus by sacrifices (whether of the broken heart, of acts of charity, or even – in extremity – of one’s body). But delight remains integral to Augustine’s account of earthly love, and he exhorts believers to cultivate a sense of rightly ordered delight, as a foretaste of the delights that will be fulfilled abundantly in heaven. In the heavenly life, delight abounds yet the embodiment of earthly love in sacrificial acts endures as a visible remainder in the heavenly body. The desire to see the martyrs’ wounds thus coheres with the continuity of ordering love and desire on earth with the sacrificial ‘glue’ that binds the body of Christ in its earthly ecclesial life in uia to its heavenly fulfillment in eternal union. (2) charity’s outward manifestation in various sacramenta, ranging from the animal (and grain) victims of the Old Testament, to Christ himself, and to the Eucharist; and (3) Christ’s body, considered as the body that hung on the cross, the body that gathers around the altar, and the Eucharistic body upon the altar. Throughout Book 10, Augustine moves fluidly between them all. Charity, the true sacrifice, elides with its sacramenta, which are especially the acts of or involving the body of Christ, while the three instances of Christ’s body are discussed in ways that simply flow into each other without transition: from the offering of the redeemed city, to the offering of the passion, to the offering of one’s own body, to the unity of the church, to the Eucharist. All of these are, in Augustine’s eyes, one sacrifice’. E.R. Schlesinger, ‘Sacrificial Ecclesiology’ (2016), 152. 15 Ciu. 10.30: rationales mentes in tanti artificis laudem rationabilis pulchritudinis delectatione succendent.

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What does this mean for the kind of imagination shaped by the image of resurrected bodies that retain their wounds or the scars of their wounds? A full response to this question exceeds the scope of this paper, but I will venture a couple of suggestions. One implication of Augustine’s claim about the martyrs, to distill it theologically, is that losses and injuries suffered for love of Christ on earth retain signifying and re-signifying power. In the case of the martyrs, sacrificial love’s earthly, embodied acts and expressions have signifying bearing on heavenly bodies. This opens up broader questions about the ways in which the imagined ideal of the resurrected body, in its continuity and discontinuity with the earthly body, inflects the way we understand our earthly bodies and what we do with them in this life. It also opens onto questions about the constitution of that ideal and its implications. My point in this paper, however, is to emphasize the significance of Augustine’s exceptional affirmation of a physical remainder of earthly wounds on the resurrected body; the way in which this opens up a specific continuity between an act of sacrificial love in the earthly life and the restoration of the resurrected body; the way in which the desire that he thinks we have to see this specific continuity affects the constitution of the resurrected body. And this, in turn, reveals that the eschatological ordering of love and desire is responsive to exceptional earthly acts – to the point that it is reflected in the eschatological body itself.

Monica between the Two Cities: The Place of Conversion in the Thought of Augustine Terence SWEENEY, Villanova University and Collegium Institute, Philadelphia, PA, USA

ABSTRACT In this paper, I explore Augustine’s Confessiones as a political text by looking at the spiritual/political topologies of Monica. I argue that Monica moves from Babylon towards Jerusalem by converting to a hope that forms one’s vocation, strategically working for peace, and fostering an other-worldly focus that grounds this-worldly charity and worship. I examine Augustine’s portrayal of Monica and her three conversions: her own, her son’s, and her husband’s. In each, we see a conversion from imperial values. This shows a political peregrination in the ‘towards’ of the pilgrim city. In Monica’s conversion, there is a move from the outskirts of Babylon towards Jerusalem as she lets go of her ambitions for her son. She converts her desires for her son which enables his own conversion from being an imperial official to being a committed Christian. I connect these conversions to the troubling portrayal of domestic violence in Book 9 of the Confessiones. Recognizing the problematic portrayal of the submissive wife, I argue that Monica subverts this submission. Through strategy and rhetoric, Monica brings about the conversion of her husband Patricius from a relationship predicated on dominance, violence, and lust (the glories of Rome) to a relationship based on peace (Christianity). Monica shows how Christianity can convert people to peace through non-violence. Finally, I address the concern that Monica’s politics, as otherworldly, is an anti-politics by arguing that her other-worldly concerns grounds her this-worldly engagement in works of mercy and liturgy.

Dorothy Day stated that she did not want to be declared a saint because that would make her too easy to dismiss. These words can be applied to St Monica who has become the crying saint of stain glass windows instead of a woman who challenges us to not to conform to our age. Monica is rarely looked at as a political figure, but her conversion was, in part, political. If we think political philosophy is primarily a matter of determining the structure and justification of a government and the process of legislation, judging, and enforcing the law then the Confessiones – and De ciuitate Dei for that matter – are not political texts. This is to take politics, and social ethics, in an excessively narrow way. My proposal is to take the political as primarily an expression of the directionality of communal life and to see in Monica a guide for changing our direction. To see this is to recognize oneself as situated in a place with certain mores

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structured by its shared objects of love ordered according to its highest love. This is less about space and more about political and spiritual topologies marked by the shared directionality of a community’s love which is the place of the community. The place of a community is its weight as directionality of loving attention to the ‘objects of their love’.1 In The Confessiones, Augustine chronicles different peoples’ (and primarily his own) changes from certain communities to other community by means of their changed loves. This entails a change of their ordo amoris from Babylon/Rome towards Jerusalem. The Confessiones, then, are an account of place as expressive of the shared loves of a community, shared loves which summon Augustine, and us, to convert from the mores of Babylon toward Jerusalem. I take Monica to be a helpful figure for thinking through topologies of conversion. The story of her life is the story of converting from Babylon toward Jerusalem, which ultimately are the two cities we can live towards. To understand this, we must see the whence and thence of conversion.2 Monica is not the static figure that we sometimes receive in devotional portrayals of her: always pious, ever holy, and constantly weeping and praying by herself. Rather, she is a figure who struggles ‘in the middle’, between the city she is departing from (Babylon) and the city toward which she journeys (Jerusalem). Hers is a conversion from the mores of one city to the mores of another, from certain agreed objects of love to the true Subject of our loves. The media res between is the space of pilgrimage, it is the place of differing as one moves from shared objects of love owned by the Babylonian community to the Subject of our love shared by the community of Jerusalem. Monica’s place is the towards which is neither Babylon nor Jerusalem but the Church, the pilgrim society that receives its essential characteristic as the polity which is ad deum. The Church is the place of the towards and so is sacrament of the pilgrim city. In the place of the towards, we find those whose loving attention is shifting, moving from and towards. We thus find a sundry company of pilgrims – some closer to Babylon and some closer to Jerusalem. Monica presents the reader with a challenge of how to navigate the conversions between the two cities in showing how people live in differing places along the way, because we find her at times closer to Babylon and at time closer to Jerusalem. In this position between these two cities – as she is herself converting to Jerusalem – she works to convert others, primarily but not exclusively Augustine and Patricius. These three conversions (hers, Augustine’s, Patricius’) reveal some of the constitutive 1 Augustine, De ciuitate Dei (ciu.), ed. B. Dombart, CChr.SL 47-8 (Turnhout, 1955), 19.24: Rerum quas diligit. English translation from The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. William Chase Green (Cambridge, MA, 1969). 2 Plato begins the Phaedrus, another text about conversions, with this question, which is central to any conversion: ‘Where are you going? And where have you been?’ Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, 1997), 227a.

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directionalities of the church in contrast to a community whose order of love is immanent and marked by ambition, violence, and private goods. Monica moves from these towards Jerusalem as expressed in a hope that forms one’s vocation, in peace strategically worked for, and in an other-worldly focus that makes possible this-worldly charity and worship. Converting from Ambitions toward Hope Our standard image of Monica – weeping and praying – portrays her as always already saintly and so always already an inhabitant of Jerusalem. However, Monica is not portrayed as being all that close to Jerusalem as the text begins. ‘My natural mother had by this time fled from the center of Babylon, though she still lingered in its suburbs’.3 To understand this lingering at the outskirts of Babylon requires that we see what Monica hoped for (thus why she lingered on the outskirts) and how she acted as an obstacle to Augustine’s own conversion. Babylon is emblematic of the mores of the earthly city in general, but in this context it reflects those of Rome in particular. Giosué Ghisalberti is right that Augustine ‘sees the values esteemed by his society’ as ‘the ones most in need of being reevaluated and rejected’.4 Scholars, according to Ghisalberti, have not recognized Augustine’s ‘subtle yet insistent critique of Roman society, state, and emperor long before the City of God’.5 In Monica, we can see this insistent critique operating if we attend to her reevaluation and rejection of Roman mores. The Monica we meet early in the Confessiones still primarily inhabits the values esteemed by Rome and so still primarily values success according to the measure of the Roman Empire. She is still sharing in the loves of the earthly city because the objects of her love are a mixture of those from Babylon and those from Jerusalem. She is willing to advance temperance for her son for the purposes of ambition and glory, as well as for chastity’s sake. When Augustine describes Monica as being ‘on the outskirts of Babylon’, he is also describing his own carnal appetites for theater, games, and sex. He says of himself: ‘I roamed the streets of Babylon and wallowed … My invisible enemy trampled on me and seduced me in order to fix me still faster in the center of that city, for I was easy enough to seduce’.6 Augustine, looking back, 3 Augustine, Confessiones (conf.), ed. L. Verheijen, CChr.SL 27 (Turnhout, 1981), 2.3.8: Non enim et illa, quae iam de medio Babylonis fugerat, sed ibat in ceteris eius tardior. English translations throughout from Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding, OSB (Hyde Park, NY, 2012). 4 Giosué Ghisalberti, Augustine’s Passions: His Transformation from a Roman Citizen to a Catholic Bishop, 354-401 (Milwaukee, 2016), 34. 5 Ibid. 12. 6 Conf. 2.3.8: Ecce cum quibus comitibus iter agebam platearum Babyloniae, et volutabar in caeno eius tamquam in cinnamis et unguentis pretiosis. Et in umbilico eius quo tanacius haererem, calacabat me inimicus invisibilis et seducebat me, quia ego seductilis eram.

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wonders why no marriage was arranged for him, and he sees in this reluctance Monica’s dwelling in the outskirts of Babylon. ‘Her reluctance to arrange a marriage for me arose from the fear that if I were encumbered with a wife my hope could be dashed – not hope in you for the world to come, to which she held herself, but my hope of academic success’.7 Here we see two different hopes. The hope for God and the hope for temporal success. Monica did not want a marriage to block Augustine’s and her own hopes for success. As we will see, Monica’s marital machinations are consistently marked by a tangled hope: partially for a path to chastity for her son but primarily as a path to worldly success. Monica dwells in the outskirts because of her lust for glory: in this case the glory of her son’s sterling career in Roman affairs. More even than Patricius, she is a driving force in channeling Augustine from youthful sexual indiscretions to the disciplined pursuit of imperial career success. Though Augustine sees her tears and prayers as essential to his conversion, his assessment of Monica vacillates throughout the text. While the pious image of Monica is understandable, the idea that Augustine was writing such a hagiography underestimates the sense in which Augustine does not write hagiography but confessio. Margaret More O’Ferrall writes that ‘Augustine clearly wishes to see and present Monica as the Christian mother par excellence, whose work towards the salvation of her son is closely allied with the work of the Mother Church’.8 In truth, Monica fits Augustine’s sense of the Christian life as one of conversion: people deeply wounded by sin struggling to journey toward the wholeness of Jerusalem. This entails seeing the need for ongoing conversion, since the only righteousness of this life lies in the forgiveness of sins. In the opening books of Augustine’s Confessiones, Monica’s more active efforts were for her son’s temporal advancement. He writes that his family’s ‘only concern was that I should learn to excel in rhetoric and persuasive speech’ for ‘they thought only of sating man’s insatiable appetite for a poverty tricked out as wealth and a fame that is but infamy’.9 The Monica of Augustine’s adolescent and young adult period remains primarily concerned with his success in rhetoric, success which will lead to fame and wealth for Augustine and for her. Her ambition is in the Roman sense of virtue structured around glory and success: virtue is achieved not as good itself but as a means to temporal goods. Augustine must not marry, even if as a result he falls into sexual sin, because marriage would obstruct his career in the Roman Imperial system. If he 7 Ibid.: Non curavit hoc, quia metus erat, ne inpediretur spes mea conpede uxoria, non spes illa, quam in te future saeculi hababat matter, sed spes litteraram. 8 Margaret More O’Ferrall, ‘Monica, the Mother of Augustine: A Reconsideration’, Recherches Augustiniennes et Patristiques 10 (1974), 23-43, 37. 9 Conf. 1.12.29: Illi enim no intuebantur, quo referrem quod me discere cogebant, praeterquam ad satiandas insatiabilies cupiditates coipsae inopiae et ignominiosae gloriae.

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is to be chaste, it is for a dual goal: success in Babylon and in Jerusalem. This is why Monica lingers in the outskirts. Her ambitions are too Roman. As Augustine ages, Monica increasingly is concerned to see him established in the faith, but this hope remains deeply mixed up in her temporal ambitions. Augustine writes of himself that he was ‘hankering after honors, wealth, and marriage’.10 So too was Monica. There was ‘insistent pressure on me to marry a wife’, Augustine tells us, ‘… and a marriage was being arranged for me, thanks especially to my mother’s efforts’.11 With a good marriage, Monica could expect the possibility of a secure income and a possible governorship for her son. While Monica sees marriage as a step towards chastity and baptism for her son, she is in no rush. The marriage she arranges must wait two years. A hastier marriage would perhaps have been less advantageous but surely could have accelerated Augustine’s baptism and entrance into chaste sexual relations. Her mixed motivations are perhaps the reason why she had ‘illusory, fantastic dreams’ about Augustine’s ‘future marriage’.12 Dwelling in the outskirts, she wants the successes that mark Babylon or Jerusalem for Augustine and for herself. Yes, she prays for his baptism and marriage, but she too prays ‘not yet’. Anything too soon would obstruct Babylonian accomplishments. She dwells in the outskirts because she seeks to serve two masters, and this is not an option. The point here is not to paint Monica in an unflattering light but to makes sense of her lingering on the outskirts of Babylon. This lingering evokes her fundamental movement towards Jerusalem but also her continuing worldly attachments. Though she takes her time in the outskirts of Babylon, her place is between and towards – which is to say, she dwells in the Church. She does want to go to Jerusalem, and she does want Augustine to end up there. As Augustine writes of this journey: ‘to travel – and more to reach journey’s end – was nothing else but to want to go there’.13 The intending and so the directionality of one’s hope is key. As Catherine Pickstock elucidates, ‘a person’s identity is defined and performed not only by his position in a particular place, but also by a kind of journeying, an “identity” which is always in media res’.14 This marks our identity as in uiā. To not want to go forward is to be torn in two directions: toward Rome and toward Jerusalem. Augustine sees his own division as preventing him from wanting it ‘valiantly and with all my heart’ and so he ‘whirls and tosses this way and that [with] a will half crippled by the

10

Ibid. 6.6.9: Inhiabam honoribus, lucris, cuniugio. Ibid. 6.13.23: Et instabatur inpigre, ut ducerem uxorem. Iam petebam, iam promittebatur, maxime matre dante operam. 12 Ibid: Futura matrimonio meo … Et videbat quaedam vana et phantastica. 13 Ibid. 8.8.19: Nam non solum ire, verum etiam pervenire illuc, nihil erat aliud quam velle ire. 14 Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Malden, MA, 1998), 45. 11

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struggle, as part of it rose up to walk while part sank down’.15 In some sense this is the place of Monica, the place of conversion, the place of hearts that struggle because they want to travel and yet they linger even in their journeying. If we are to become citizens of the ciuitas dei, and so want to move towards God in the pilgrim society, our hopes must be different. For Monica and Augustine, their hopes are still too mixed, still too Babylonian. When Monica has her dream of Jesus (a topological vision), she sees herself as ‘standing on some kind of wooden ruler [regula] … He then instructed and admonished her to take good heed and see that where she stood, there also stood I … She took heed and saw me standing close beside her on the same rule [regula]’.16 Augustine is potentially a member of the Church and so – in a dream not bound by temporal norms – he is in the same place as Monica. To be in the same place is to be in the church, in uiā ad deum. Monica travels ahead of him in the towards of the church, and so she can aid him in his movement between cities. But for his conversion to take place, Monica must more fully inhabit a different hope and no longer mix it with her temporal ambitions. Specifically, she must stop pushing for his imperial success. Augustine does not portray this purification of her hope. Nonetheless, it must have taken place for she rejoices when he abandons his career and breaks off his profitable engagement. At some point, she has shifted her hopes so that she can accept his conversion. Her conversion thus helps allow of Augustine’s conversion. She moves farther along in the Church and so enables his beginning in the Church. She no longer lingers in the outskirts and so Augustine can travel farther along towards Jerusalem. Converting from Violence towards Peace By moving beyond the outskirts, she enables Augustine’s own movement towards and so his entrance into the Church, as sacrament of the pilgrim society. This topological move of Monica’s is as important as her prayers and tears. By shifting her hopes from Babylon to Jerusalem she opens the path for Augustine to do so as well. Thus, their two conversions – and the anti-imperial movement they entail – are bound together. Conversion is not primarily individual but communal as shown with Augustine’s friends, his encounters with others’ conversions, and his own entrance into community upon converting. The place of the towards is that of an ecclesial polity ad deum. 15 Conf. 8.8.19: sed velle fortiter et integre, non semisauciam hac atque hac versare et iactare voluntatem, parte adsurgente cum alia parte cadent luctantem. 16 Ibid. 3.11.19: Vidit enim se stantem in quadam regula lignea … iussisse illum, quo secura esset, atque admonuisse, ut adtenderet et videret, ubi esset illa, ibi esse et me. Quod illa ubi adtendit, vidit me iuxta se in eadem regula stantem.

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These two conversions are not the only ones that Monica’s is bound up in. We must also take up the question of her conversion of Patricius from the mores of Babylon to the mores of Jerusalem. Where the first two conversion regard the different hopes of the two cities, this conversion is from violence and subordination. It takes place by means of the subversion of Roman models of dominance. It is a conversion to peace by means of a strategy of peace. Virgil had seen the Roman mores as expressed in the imposition ‘of law’ by which Rome was ‘to spare the conquered, battle down the proud’.17 In so doing, Rome creates a counterfeit peace, for it is a peace forged by violence which imposes suppression. The ordo it forms is an ordo dominandi not an ordo amoris. The pax romanum depends on coercion rather than the love that makes for the true peace of tranquilitas ordinis. When there is not actual violence in the Empire, ‘the gates of War /Will then be shut. Inside unholy Furor, /Squatting on cruel weapons, hands enchained /Behind him by a hundred links of bronze, / Will grind his teeth and howl with bloodied mouth’.18 The pax Romanum is the peace of the suppression forged by conquest and the ever-present threat of war. At its heart is howling fury and suppressed violence. To see how Monica acts counter to this model of community life requires that we take up the complicated and unpleasant portrayal of domestic life in Book 9 of the Confessiones. In what follows, I am not promoting Monica’s (or Augustine’s) approach to domestic violence nor am I condoning Augustine’s failure to condemn domestic violence. Augustine’s own conversion to a love marked by peace was, sadly, never complete (as the Donatist controversies later showed). But in these chapters of Book 9, we do see an account of conversion from the mores of violence, suppression, and infidelity by means of peacemaking, rhetoric, and the intention to convert to a home marked by the ordo amoris et tranquillitas ordinis. This tranquil and loving household is a place of neither violence nor of caged fury. While Augustine does not condemn domestic violence and infidelity, it is also manifest that Patricius is converted from the center of Babylon to the towards of the Church precisely because he is converted from violence and infidelity. To understand this section requires that we see in Monica the gift of peace. Augustine writes of her that she had a ‘great gift with which you had endowed this bondswoman of yours with … and that was the gift of acting as peacemaker’.19 This is not just due to her peaceful temperament; rather, she makes peace through rhetoric and planning. As Augustine describes, she brings about peace between rival parties by only sharing the information that would bring about reconciliation. She is strategic and uses the available means of persuasion. Augustine here is presenting us with a woman who not only is peacefully 17 18 19

Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York, 1990), VII 1153-4. Ibid. I 395-9. Conf. 9.9.21: Hoc quoque ili bono mancipio tuo … tam se praedebat pacificam.

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but brings peace in a strategic manner. She makes peace by means of peaceful and intentional rhetoric with the goal of bringing about reconciliation. This portrayal carries over into her household relations. Augustine seems to offer an image of Monica as fulfilling the Roman ideal of a matron who is submissive to her husband. And yet, he also portrays her as the true leader of the family. He writes that ‘she served him as her lord, but she made it her business to win him for you by preaching to him through her way of life [moribus suis]’.20 Monica, serving Patricius as though he were master, was in fact leading Patricius to peace by her mores. By the customs of Jerusalem, she intends to lead Patricius towards Jerusalem. In fact, Augustine shows Monica consistently as the true leader of the household, noting that she governed or led her household to piety: Domum suam pie tractaverat.21 It is Monica who leads the household in order to win Patricius for God. In the patriarchal world of Rome, this leading is dangerous. Patricius still lives by the mores of Rome, with its ideal home as the space of the father who violently holds in check its members. In this we see the dark words regarding abuse and infidelity. But we should see Monica as proposing a plan to end both by means of rhetoric which operates with the available means of persuasion. The violent patriarchy makes a direct approach impossible, so Monica acts according to a plan, which she shares with others, to subvert that violent patriarchal household. As Silvia Benso writes, Monica ‘cleverly absents herself at her husband’s outbursts of rage. And in the recesses of her house and friendships, she builds her own world of independence, where men are mocked through the superior acts of rhetoric and persuasion’.22 For Benso, this ‘may not be much by contemporary standards of feminism’, but it was a way to live towards God while turning out not to be ‘Patricius’ servant, but Patricius’ leader’.23 Perhaps this is the meaning of her speaking ‘veluti per iocum graviter admonens’.24 She speaks as one joking but gravely that they are now ‘ancillae’ to their husbands.25 Perhaps, the joke and the gravity come across in the sense that they are in a grave situation as powerless and yet they can act against this strategically and so be more than maidservants. They can, in truth, lead their households. Monica’s goal is to convert Patricius from Rome and its model of community. Despite his violations of the marital bed and his being ‘hot-tempered’ Monica avoids being hit, unlike her friends. This appears, at first blush, to be a coping mechanism which allows for the continuing wrath and infidelity of her husband. But Augustine portrays Monica as in fact having a plan to change 20 Ibid. 9.9.18: Tradita viro servivit veluti domino, et sategit eum lucrari tibi, loquens te illi moribus suis. 21 Ibid. 9.9.22. 22 Silvia Benso, ‘Monica’s Grin of Tension’, Contemporary Philosophy 15.2 (1993), 5-10, 6. 23 Ibid. 6. 24 Conf. 9.9.19. 25 Ibid.

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Patricius’ ways: ‘She learned to offer him no resistance, by deed or even by word, when he was angry; she would wait for a favorable moment, when she saw that his mood had changed and he was calm again, and then explain her action, in case he had given way to wrath without due consideration’.26 In the face of his violence, Monica is strategic. The goal is not to just avoid violence but to bring about a change in place for her husband. It is important to highlight that a patriarchal society in which the ‘onus in reconciliation and domestic peace-keeping lay with the wife’ is an unjust one.27 Augustine fails to see this and so fails to articulate this. And yet, Monica still acts as a force of conversion away from violence and so towards a model of the domestic and the political in which such an onus would not fall on the marginalized. Monica expresses this to her friends when she advise that they too be peacemakers, for she ‘would instruct them in this plan of hers that I have outlined’.28 Without doubt this is a dark vision, especially when we find that ‘those who followed it found out its worth and were happy; those who did not continued to be bullied and battered’.29 Augustine seems to disapprove of the women who ‘continue to be battered’, and for this he rightly merits our critique. Monica, and these women, live in what Patricia Clark describes as the shadow of ‘imminent violence’, such that the ‘bruised faces of other wives would have been sufficient to ensure that she was obedient, nonconfrontational, rational, and controlled’.30 No woman should be faced with such a situation. Augustine’s repeated failure to say this is both a sin and a failure to address systematic misogyny. Such a form of preaching was possible for Augustine. As Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle indicates, Augustine was able to push cultural norms in his condemnation of male infidelity. She writes that Augustine ‘rejected the double standard of sexual morality … He commanded them [women] emphatically not to suffer the unchastity of their husbands but to appeal it to the ecclesial authority’.31 Augustine was right to preach against male infidelity; he should have also preached against domestic violence. Further, as Joy A. Schroeder’s article ‘John Chrysostom’s Critique of Spousal Violence’ indicates, such a condemnation could have been made by Augustine precisely because it was made by a contemporary.32 26

Ibid.: Sed noverat haec non resistere irato vior, non tantum facto, sed n verbo quidem. Iam vero refractum et quietum cum opportunum viderat, rationem facti sui reddebat, si forte ille inconsideratius commotus fuerat. 27 Patricia Clark, ‘Women, Slaves, and the Hierarchies of Domestic Violence: The Family of St. Augustine’, in Sandra R. Joshel and Sheila Murnaghan (eds), Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture: Differential Equations (New York, 1998), 109-29, 122. 28 Conf. 9.9.19: Docebat illa institutum suum, quod supra memoravi. 29 Ibid.: Quae observabant, expertae gratulabantur; quae non observabant, subiectae vexabantur. 30 P. Clark, ‘Women’ (1998), 115. 31 Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Divine Domesticity: Augustine of Thagaste to Teresa of Avila (New York, 1997), 27. 32 Joy A. Schroeder, ‘John Chrysostom’s Critique of Spousal Violence’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 12 (2004), 413-42.

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However valid these critiques are, it is important to see that Monica is not just trying to avoid getting hit. She trying to bring about a change in her situation so that hitting (and infidelity) will no longer be a threat. The goal of Monica is clear: to end the threat of marital violence and male infidelity. She works by means of peace to make peace in the face of violence and infidelity. Under Patricius, she lives in oppression, but she works to subvert that arrangement and bring Patricius into the mores of a different city. It is Monica who is the true leader of the household which she leads by love towards love and so by means of peace away from violence. Though Augustine fails to say it, Monica acts not only as a critic of patriarchal violence but as an agent of change in her household and others. By her plan and approach, she brings about changes because she, in truth and by God’s grace, leads the household towards Jerusalem. And so ‘she won her husband for you, toward the end of his life on earth, and she has no cause of complaint about anything after his baptism that she had tolerated in him while unbaptized’.33 Augustine merits criticism for his equivocation on the evil of domestic violence. But he clearly sees a shift from domestic violence and infidelity towards domestic tranquility to be good and approves of Monica’s role in this shift. What Monica reveals is that: to move towards Jerusalem is to abandon the mode of governance that marks Rome. Monica brings about this movement towards Jerusalem and so brings Patricius into the place of the Church. In this, Monica presents us with a challenge: What has Rome to do with Jerusalem? What has violence to do with peace? The answer, in truth, is nothing. Augustine – and to some extent Monica – is not able to inhabit this answer fully. But it is Monica who points the way towards a politics of peace and so towards an account of conversion that always operates peacefully. If the goal was the vision of peace, then the means were to be peaceful.34 The movement from Babylon towards Jerusalem is last shown in Augustine’s prayer for his parents. This prayer and Augustine’s description of Monica on the outskirts of Babylon bookends the life of Monica. They reveal Augustine’s early thoughts on the two cities. In book two, Augustine and Patricius dwell in the heart of Babylon living by the mores of Rome, while Monica lingers on the outskirts. At the end of Book 9, Augustine situates her in Jerusalem and himself in the Church, revealed as a neighborhood of Jerusalem. He prays: Remember Monica, your servant, along with Patricius … These who were my parents in this transitory light, but also were my brethren under you, our Father, within our 33 Conf. 9.9.22: Denique, etiam virum suum iam in extrema vita temporali eius lucrate est tibi; nec in eo iam fideli planxit, quod in nonudum fideli toleraverat. 34 This was a lesson Augustine had a hard time living. While reluctant to use force in religious discourse, he gradually shifted to a view in which he allowed it for pedogeological purposes. He had forgotten the lesson that he learned as a body: we learn best through kindness.

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mother the Catholic Church, and my fellow citizens in the eternal Jerusalem, for which your people sigh with longing throughout its pilgrimage.35

Long before De ciuitate Dei, it is Monica who teaches Augustine – by her conversions – that there are two cities. Only within the place of the Church can they be towards Jerusalem where now Monica and Patricius dwell not as aliens but as fellow citizen. Regarding the World If Monica provides us with a guide to a different communal ordo amoris, it is a markedly ‘other-worldly’ one marked by its sense of pilgrimage contra mundum ad deum. Monica is ‘other-worldly’ if by that we mean her conversion is one of attention from this world to the heavenly Jerusalem. This is only a flaw if one assumes that Monica’s attention on the heavenly Jerusalem is wrong and so critiques her for violating this assumption. Such a critique takes for granted the view that ‘the world as it stands is somehow a relatively coherent, relatively integral whole … within which religious commitments … can at best “supervene” upon or complement material reality.’36 For Charles Mathewes, Augustine reminds us that ‘the concept of a pure “nature” is a fable. Grace is not a superadditum to nature, but rather an integral part of the created order’.37 For Augustine to learn this, he must follow Monica in seeing worldly value as subordinated, but not obliterated, to the mores of an otherworldly city active in the this-worldly pilgrim society. Critiques of the otherworldly tend to take it as given that in having an ‘otherworldly’ focus, one disregards this world. Isn’t this the case with Monica? A good example of this would be Monica’s lack of concern about where she is to be buried and her shift from ambition to hope. Doesn’t this indicate that her shift to an ‘otherworldly’ community entails a failure to care for the communities in which she dwells? Consequently, wouldn’t this mean she is an apolitical or even anti-political figure? But it is precisely the shift of fidelity from the Roman community to the ecclesial/heavenly community that enables Monica to be at hand for those around her. She is otherworldly in her conversion from an ambition that uses others for the advancement of self (Augustine’s lover and his affianced). This 35 Conf. 9.13.37: Meminerint ad altare tuum Monnicae, famulae tuae, cum Patricio, quondam eius coniuge, per Quorum carnem introduxisti me in hanc vitam, quemadmodium nescio. Meminerent cum affectu pio parentum meorum in hac luce transitoria, et fratrum meorum sub te patre in matre catholic, et civium meorum in aeterna Hierusalem, cui suspirat peregrination polui tui ab exitue usqua reditum. 36 Charles T. Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life (Cambridge, UK, 2008), 70. 37 Ibid. 70.

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is Roman ambition marked by a competitive drive that sees in others only tools for self-advancement. She is otherworldly in being a maker of peace and an advocate for fidelity. She is otherworldly in her works of service for others. She is otherworldly in her liturgical practice, which breaks down the false barrier between the otherworld and this. Monica’s heavenly vocation grounds her earthly vocations of service. The otherworldly do not disregard this world; they regard it differently. They regard it from the place of Jerusalem and so according to different mores, mores of hope, peace, and loving service. Mathewes, citing multiple religiously motivated civil rights movements, notes that ‘in all of these, the presence of religious bodies expressly committed to presumably “otherworldly” values was essential to the movements’ contemporary success and relatively peacefulness’.38 In her conversion towards Jerusalem, Monica is enabled to attend to others in their this-worldly needs by her otherworldly values. Her peacemaking – according to the logic of the world – seems a ‘good of small account’.39 In truth, her peacemaking was her loving attention to the communities here because she was guided by the mores of the community there. Recognizing that the violence of Rome has nothing to do with the peace of Jerusalem enabled Monica to be an agent of peace in her communities. This is not naiveté, for as Augustine notes: she knows what to do be to be effective in reconciling and is able to wisely use peaceable speech to bring about peace. Further, in adopting the mores of Jerusalem while living in the towards of the Church, Monica was able see what Ghisalberti describes as the ecclesial task: ‘taking care of those people crucial to the church and so often mistreated and neglected by the customs and traditions of Roman society; the poor and old, women and slaves, children and the physically afflicted’.40 For as Augustine indicates, she had ‘earned a reputation for good works’.41 Her otherworldliness in fact motivates her good works in that ‘her spiritual fervor prompted her to good works and brought her constantly to church’.42 In this Monica fulfills latreia, the task of the works of mercy and the works of worship. Her fidelity to Jerusalem made it possible for her to be ‘serva servorum’.43 The this-worldly logic of Babylon sees the other as potentially conquered, exploited, 38 Ch.T. Mathewes, Theology (2008), 299. One such example is the early Church’s service of the poor. ‘The ascription of “the poor” became more fundamental than that of “citizen” at this time – a human being’s impoverishment is a more important fact about her or him than whether she or he is a member of the same political community as you yourself are. The bishops had noticed that the received political languages of their day obscured realities that church practices made palpable for them; and they changed that language in order to render that reality more fully visible’ (ibid. 252). 39 Conf. 9.9.21: Parvum hoc bonum mihi videretur. 40 G. Ghisalberti, Augustine’s Passions (2016), 177. 41 Conf. 9.9.22: In operibus bonis testimonium hababat. 42 Ibid. 4.2.2: Qua in bonis operabus tam fervens spiritu frequentabat ecclesiam. 43 Ibid. 9.9.22.

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or flattered. The other-worldly logic of Monica sees others as fellow servants of the Lord and so figures to whom we can render service. Importantly, it sees the other not as a resource or a mirror of my glory but as person with whom we share God and so ought to share bread. This service is brought to its purist form in the service of God at the liturgy, which is the heart of a this-worldly otherworldliness. Thus, Monica asks that in this world, she be remembered when she is in the otherworld. ‘To be remembered at the altar of the Lord’ is an act of service rendered here to a fellow citizen there, who in turn prays there for the pilgrims here.44 This loving exchange across worlds discloses that the pilgrim society and the heavenly society are one. The other-worldliness of prayer is transformative of this world precisely because it makes the boundaries between the two more porous. In praying for our daily bread, we find we must share our bread. In looking to Jerusalem, we act as though we already live there. This is the work of the liturgy. In the liturgy, we stand with Monica in the place of the church and of Jerusalem, the place of hope, peace, and service. Conclusion By the logic of Rome, Monica failed in her death. Her life’s ambition to see her son successful in the Empire had come to naught. She died far from her home, a widow whose son had failed to make good. As a woman in Rome, her only possible success was the success of the men to whom she belonged: father, husband, and sons. But by the logic of Jerusalem, she brought peace to those around her, brought Augustine and Patricius to the place of the Church, served God’s servants and God’s poor, and worshipped at the altar of the Lord. She herself had moved – and she enabled others to move – toward Jerusalem, the vision of peace. She did so by living the mores of Jerusalem in this world: the mores of a hope not dependent on human glory, the mores of acting peacefully to make peace, and the mores of service beyond dominion. In changing her mores, she changed her place, moving from the outskirts of Babylon to the heart of Jerusalem. By changing the direction of her heart, she shared in different objects of love, objects which form a community unfettered from Babylon’s objects of love and ordered toward the Divine Subject of love. This is the pilgrim society living with one heart ad deum. Monica thus continues to present us with the challenge of conversion to a different place, with its different mores formed by the its different love. To which city do we show fidelity: Babylon or Jerusalem? If we follow her lead, we will leave this place, enter the place of pilgrimage, serve others through peace, and hope to enter Jerusalem to meet her, our fellow citizen. 44

Ibid. 9.13.36: Ut ad domini altare memineritis mei.

Politics and the Parodic City: Augustine’s Sacramental Vision and its Institutional Implications Veronica ROBERTS OGLE, Assumption University, Worcester, MA, USA

ABSTRACT It has frequently been noted that Augustine is not a strong institutional thinker, especially when it comes to politics. Nevertheless, recent scholars have tended to approach Augustine’s political thought as though he thought about politics in terms of a state’s coercive institutions, which are clearly post-lapsarian. Because this assumption imports modern ideas about politics into Augustine’s framework, it fundamentally obscures what Augustine is actually saying about politics. In this paper, I argue that, like Cicero before him, Augustine actually locates politics in the shared life of a political community. This being the case, it is not so simple as to say that he identifies politics with the Fall. Rather, I argue, he associates the order of dominion and obedience that only approximates the natural order with the Fall. By showing that politics is primarily a social phenomenon, I establish that that politics is, in fact, natural for Augustine, even as coercive political institutions are post-lapsarian, and the drive to dominate others through such institutions, quite simply, sinful.

In this brief article,* I would like to explore the political implications of Augustine’s sacramental vision as presented in De ciuitate Dei, and, in particular, its institutional implications. The material contained herein comes from my current book project, A World Besieged: Politics and the Earthly City in Augustine’s City of God – in which I consider the relationship between the two entities that Augustine calls ‘the earthly city’ (the political community and the city of sin) – this is another way of approaching the question of the status of politics in his thought. Though Augustine does not explicitly tell us how the two are related, in the book, I argue that if we read De ciuitate Dei sacramentally, he does show us their relationship, which is one of hegemony. This claim sets the stage for my whole interpretation of the work and so lies in the background of this particular argument as well. Here, however, I am interested in addressing three smaller questions: first, ‘to what extent does Augustine think about politics institutionally?’ Second, ‘Is his * I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for allowing me to publish this excerpt from Chapter 6 of my recent book Politics and the Earthly City in Augustine’s City of God (Cambridge, 2020). Reprinted with permission.

Studia Patristica CXVI, 113-125. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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conception of political institutions proto-modern?’ And third, ‘Are political institutions natural, post-lapsarian, or purely sinful for Augustine?’ Before answering these questions, I should briefly explain what I mean when I call the vision presented in Augustine’s De ciuitate Dei sacramental. I do not mean that he develops a high theology of sacraments in the work, but rather, that he views the created world as a sacramentum, or, a ‘pointing thing’, and that this conviction shapes the work’s whole argument. Because Augustine reads the created world as a sign with an already intended meaning – that is, a sacramental meaning invested by God in and through His creative speech – Augustine’s whole programme in De ciuitate Dei is bound up with his desire to help his readers see this meaning anew and to recognize its parodies for what they are. Accordingly, the two cities that stand at the center of the work – one rooted in amor Dei and the other in amor sui – display two contrasting responses to the world’s sacramental meaning – which, of course, is the mysterium of amor Dei. For Augustine, the city of God receives this meaning and seeks to conform herself ever more fully to it, whereas the earthly city refuses it and seeks to endow the world with a different meaning: one more suited to its members’ own purposes. This being the case, De ciuitate Dei does not present the two cities as if they were starting out on an equal plane, one using signs for good, the other for evil. Rather, it presents the world as having an original meaning from which the earthly city is persistently falling away. Because Augustine sets all human communication against the backdrop of an already spoken Word, the words that are ‘of’ the earthly city are precisely those that deviate from the Divine Word’s meaning. In this way, De ciuitate Dei’s sacramental vision situates the dueling discourses of the two cities within a worldview that grounds one and deconstructs the other. All this said, when it comes to De ciuitate Dei’s treatment of politics, Augustine’s sacramental vision has fascinating implications. Because Augustine’s earthly city is defined by its desire to edit the original meaning of reality: to cover over meanings it does not like, and to re-enforce illusions in which it has a stake, Augustine’s very theory of the earthly city actually undermines the earthly city’s claims – which are chiefly claims to power and possession. In other words, though the earthly city grasps at the world, claiming it for itself, Augustine’s sacramental vision calls this claim into question, presenting the earthly city as a usurper with no creative power or legitimacy of its own. Ontologically, it is entirely derivative (achieving its existence only by falling away), and morally, it is entirely parodic (creating an order grounded in rebellion). This being the case, it is not proper to take Augustine’s lamentation of what politics has become, thanks to the workings of amor sui, as an argument for the sinfulness of politics per se. Instead, we have to grapple with the priority of the good in Augustine’s sacramental vision. With this in mind, the central question becomes the following: if the earthly city is not creative but parodic, parasitic, what does its version of politics parody? Is it the city of God’s ecclesial

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life or this, but perhaps also some pre-lapsarian version of politics? If the first is true, then politics ‘of’ the earthly city, but if the second is true, then some version of politics precedes the earthly city’s distortion of it. In standing before these alternatives, we glimpse the significance of the questions I would like to address today. Essentially, I will argue, there is a politics ontologically prior to the politics of the earthly city: this is a politics defined by a people’s shared pursuit of a true, albeit secondary good – earthly peace. Nevertheless, this is not to say that political institutions as we know them are natural. Instead, those involving coercion are at once products of and responses to the Fall. To put this another way, political association is natural but coercive institutions are post-lapsarian. To see this, however, we must begin by considering what politics is for Augustine. Notably, he never speaks of ‘politics’ in the abstract. Instead, he always speaks of earthly cities, or, political communities. For Augustine, the constitution of these communities reflects the ordering of the cosmos as a whole in that it is a nexus of creatures, arranged in particular relationships. Augustine, in other words, thinks that human beings are always arranged in a certain nexus such that they relate to one another through their specific roles. One might connect this to his Trinitarian theology, in which personhood is also role-based. Regardless, Augustine thinks that humans, created in the imago Dei, naturally tend to form interpersonal bonds through which they adopt specific roles and engage in common projects. Some of these bonds, roles, and projects are political in nature, others familial, others, still, ecclesial and they all reflect our social nature. As Augustine puts it, the human being is the most social creature there is; we only become the most ‘quarrelsome by perversion’.1 In trying to decipher whether political association is natural to human beings, some have suggested that Augustine makes a conceptual distinction between the political and the social so that human beings are social by nature, but political only by perversion.2 This would be a neat solution, but unfortunately the distinction rides on a modern conception of politics: one that views politics as coercion, and the institutional state as a man-made remedy against an anarchic state of nature. Augustine, however, comes at his study of politics from a premodern perspective. The Greek thought that influenced him through Cicero viewed politics as natural, and on top of this, did not focus on institutions, but, 1 Augustine, De ciuitate Dei (ciu.), ed. B. Dombart, CChr.SL 47-8 (Turnhout, 1955), 12.28: discordiosum uitio. English translations taken throughout, unless otherwise indicated, from The City of God against the Pagans, trans. H. Bettenson (London, 2003). 2 He writes: ‘Man is in his deepest essence animal sociale, a social creature, but not animal politicum, not a creature suited to live under the rule of other human beings’, Miika Ruokanen, Theology of Social Life in Augustine’s De Civitate Dei (Göttingen, 1993), 101. For examples of other scholars making similar claims, see John Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge, 1995), 227, 253; Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame, 1998), 26; and Carol Harrison, Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity (Oxford, 2000), 215, inter alia.

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again, on communities of persons. Consider the following passage from Cicero that Augustine quotes in De ciuitate Dei: … a community of different classes, high, low and middle, unites, like the varying sounds of music to form a harmony of very different parts through the exercise of rational restraint; and what is called harmony in music answers to concord in a community, and it is the best and closest bond of security in a country.3

Here we see that Cicero conceives of the res publica in terms of its members, rather than institutional branches. In Cicero’s political thought, then, and indeed, in ancient thought more broadly, political science was about how a group of people lived together, and its concern stretched to the whole of that community’s social life.4 Though Augustine anticipated certain trends in modern political thought, its institutional focus was not one of them. Throughout De ciuitate Dei, he follows Cicero in speaking about politics in classical terms – and the polis or ciuitas are not equivalent concepts to the state.5 Indeed, the only modification that Augustine makes to the classical paradigm is his naming of love as the binding force of the political community instead of ius.6 Even with this departure from Cicero, Augustine remains influenced by Cicero’s belief that when people come together to form a political community, they create a res publica, literally a ‘public thing’, which they share, promote, and protect. This res publica is simultaneously the product of their bond and the common good that holds them together. Yet, this common good can wither away through vice, so that it becomes a mere shadow of what it ought to be. Though Augustine disagrees with Cicero’s contention that the Roman republic was once bound together by true justice, he does recognize that its increasing vice is what ‘corrupted and disrupted that … unity which is … the health of a people’.7 Moreover, Augustine shares Cicero’s conviction that the true common good is more than the shared pursuit of material goods: it involves a kind of brotherhood. Lamenting the fratricide that founded the Roman ciuitas and the lack of fraternity it signified, he reflects: ‘goodness is a possession enjoyed 3 Ciu. 2.21, citing Cicero, De rep. 2.42: sic ex summis et infimis et mediis interiectis ordinibus, ut sonis, moderata ratione ciuitatem consensu dissimillimorum concinere, et quae harmonia a musicis dicitur in cantu, eam esse in ciuitate concordiam, artissimum atque optimum omni in re publica uinculum incolumitatis… 4 If anything, rather than distinguishing between the social and the political, the ancients distinguished between the public and the private. Arendt makes much, perhaps too much, of this distinction in ancient political thought. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1998), 22-78. 5 See Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society (Cambridge, 2004), 8 n. 10 and Peter Brown, ‘Saint Augustine and Political Society’, in Dorothy Donnelly (ed.), The City of God: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York, 1995), 17-36, 18. 6 See ciu. 2.21, cf. 19.21 and 19.24. This distinction has significant ramifications in that it highlights the fallenness of most political communities. Some say that it cuts off the descriptive from the normative, but I would not agree. 7 Ciu. 19.24.

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more widely by the united affections of partners in that possession in proportion to the harmony that exists among them’, such that ;anyone who refuses to enjoy this possession in partnership will not enjoy it at all’; anyone who does, however, ‘will find that he possesses it in ampler measure in proportion to his ability to love his partner in it’.8 Here, Augustine captures the true recipe for a healthy ciuitas, and in doing so, sounds very Ciceronian. Of course, given that he is in the middle of discussing fratricide, one could rightly argue that, unlike Cicero, Augustine thinks that political communities always fail to be authentically social. Rowan Williams has convincingly made this point.9 The fratricides that mark the founding of the first city, on the one hand, and the founding of Rome on the other, both show amor sui’s resistance to sharing prestige and, indeed, its blindness to the primacy of those goods which make it possible to share the rest. Yet, does all this political pessimism indicate that political communities are, by definition, sinful? Like Cicero before him, Augustine is capable of imagining how political communities could be authentically social. Reflecting on the contingent nature of Rome’s expansion, for example, Augustine writes that ‘if neighbouring peoples had been peaceable, had always acted with justice, and had never provoked attack by any wrongdoing’, the political landscape would have looked very different; indeed, he goes on, ‘human affairs would have been in a happier state; all kingdoms would be small and would have rejoiced in concord with their neighbours’.10 Similarly, he celebrates moments when justice wins out, writing that ‘when the victory goes to those who were fighting for the juster [sic] cause, can anyone doubt that the victory is a matter for rejoicing and the resulting peace is something to be desired? These things are goods and undoubtedly they are the gifts of God’.11 At bottom, Augustine considers political life to be a proper manifestation of our social nature; it just perpetually misses the mark.12 Yet, even if political association is a natural activity for human beings, it remains to be seen whether or not political institutions are natural to human beings. As many have noted, Augustine’s institutional thinking is not strongly 8

Ciu. 15.5. Rowan Williams, ‘Politics and the Soul’, in On Augustine (London, 2016), 107-30, 111. 10 Ciu. 4.15: … si quies et iustitia finitimorum contra se bellum geri nulla prouocaret iniuria ac sic felicioribus rebus humanis omnia regna parua essent concordi uicinitate laetantia. See also ciu. 2.19 and Epistula (ep.) 138.14. Here, I think, Augustine is not speculating about what politics might have been like if man had not fallen, but rather what politics would be like if all people decided to cooperate with grace, here and now. This is a theoretical possibility because each person has free will and is offered grace, even if it is virtually impossible because people refuse grace. 11 Ciu. 15.4: quando autem uincunt qui causa iustiore pugnabant, quis dubitet gratulandam esse uictoriam et prouenisse optabilem pacem? haec bona sunt et sine dubio dei dona sunt. 12 In this way, I do not wholly agree that ‘politics is a mark of fallen society’, J. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge, 1995), 252. 9

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developed and, it must be said, he is simply not concerned with the project of crafting institutions or examining how different institutional arrangements might better achieve certain political goals.13 Instead, when he does talk about institutions, he is clearly focused on the persons doing the instituting; speaking predominately of acts of institution, Augustine presents human institutions as the practices that individuals and communities have established as a means to their own ends. Thus, he is primarily concerned with what these institutions reveal about those who initiated them. This emphasis reflects Augustine’s overall contention that human beings either participate in or cover over the original meaning of reality with their conventions.14 One of the few times Augustine mentions instituta in noun form is actually in De ciuitate Dei 19.17. Here, he uses the term as a vague catch-all for the means that political communities devise to promote earthly peace, listing them alongside the laws and customs that members of the pilgrim city are happy to follow, so long as they do not hinder latreia. These are products of human ingenuity, and like other conventions, have the potential to be in harmony with the original meaning of creation but are not guaranteed to be so. In reality, then, Augustine does not discuss political institutions to a significant extent. However, in the latter part of De ciuitate Dei 19, he does consider how political communities approximate earthly peace in a fallen world, and the roles and responsibilities that their members take on as a result. Here is where coercion comes into the picture. In discussing the social order as we know it, Augustine distinguishes between ‘what was required by the order of nature and what was demanded by the deserts of sinners’15. Importantly, his use of the term ‘order of nature’ shows again that he conceives of nature in its integrity; unlike the moderns, his version is hardly anarchic. Instead, it is marked by a divinely appointed order.16 13

Oliver O’Donovan, ‘Augustine’s City of God XIX and Western Political Thought’, Dionysus 11 (1987), 89-110, 99; R. Williams, ‘Politics and the Soul’ (2016), 110. 14 Examples include the institution of the rules of war (ciu. 2.2); the institution of particular church communities (ciu. 2.6); the practices of the many (ciu. 2.7, 21); the institution of the Roman priesthood (ciu. 2.8, 15; 3.9), the institution of the Jewish priesthood (ciu. 17.5); the calling of the disciples (ciu. 18.54), the founding of the Academic school (ciu. 19.1); the institution of the secular games (ciu. 2.8; 3.18; 18.2); man-made, rather than natural occurrences (ciu. 12.10); God’s creation, particularly of human beings (ciu. 12.1, 11-3, 24; 13.3; 14.27; 20.8; 22.24 inter alia), political founding (ciu. 15.5); the institution of laws and courts (ciu. 18.3; 19.17); and once, the institution of political offices (ciu. 5.12). The most frequent reference, however, relates to the institution of superstitious practices and the erection of false gods (ciu. 4.10, 26; 6.4-6; 7.1, 34; 8.24-7; 18.12-3, 24 inter alia). Most of these occur in verb form, rather than speaking of ‘institutions’ per se. 15 Ciu. 19.15: ut etiam sic insinuaret deus, quid postulet ordo creaturarum, quid exigat meritum peccatorum. 16 John Rist argues that, by the time Augustine writes ciu., ‘the natural order’ only refers to ‘the physical world’, and that ‘the operations of human and angelic wills are not included in it’, J. Rist, Ancient Thought Baptized (1995), 214-5. I, however, do not agree that this is the case; for

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Overlaid on top of this order, however, is the order of dominion, which is also ordained by God, but as a punishment for sin.17 Noticing in Scripture that ‘the first just men were set up as shepherds of flocks, rather than as kings of men’, Augustine takes this as evidence that God did not originally wish human beings to have dominion over one another.18 There is, he seems to suggest, a dignity in being made in God’s image that renders it unfitting. The difficulty is in discovering what counts as dominion (dominium) for Augustine. By making slavery the ultimate example of dominion, Augustine shows that its essence lies in coercion: the slave is obligated to obey the master’s will because he is wholly subject to him. He lacks any choice. Tracing the origin of slavery (servitus) to sin, Augustine argues that the result of sin is a new ‘order of peace in which men are subordinate to other men’.19 Leaving his justification of slavery to the side, we can therefore conclude that Augustine views all institutions in which some people are subject (subderetur) to others as post-lapsarian modifications to the order of nature. It is the Fall that has thrust human beings into positions of command and obedience. The difficulty, however, arises at the beginning of 19.15. There, Augustine deems a certain relationship to be ‘prescribed by the order of nature (hoc naturalis ordo praescribit)’.20 At first glance, it appears that he is referring to the domestic arrangement exposited in the previous chapter. Yet, this, too, seems to be marked by dominion: ‘wives obey husbands, the children obey their parents, the servants (servis) their masters’.21 What is the difference? While it might seem that Augustine is merely deeming domestic dominion natural, and example, in ciu. 11.16, Augustine writes that in the order of nature, the angels are higher than all the other creatures: tantum ualet in naturis rationalibus quoddam ueluti pondus uoluntatis et amoris, ut, cum ordine naturae angeli hominibus, tamen lege iustitiae boni homines malis angelis praeferantur. Accordingly, I read the order of nature as referring to the whole of God’s providential design. 17 Indeed, Augustine’s culminating insight that man was not originally intended ‘to have dominion over any but irrational creatures (inrationabilibus)’ follows from the way amor sui does violence to the natural order (ciu. 19.15: nisi inrationabilibus dominari). We see this, for example, in his presentation of the earthly city’s peace. Pride’s peace, he has famously argued, ‘hates a fellowship of equality under God, and seeks to impose its own dominion on fellow men, in place of God’s rule’ (ciu. 19.12: odit namque cum sociis aequalitatem sub illo, sed inponere uult sociis dominationem suam pro illo). True peace, on the other hand, ‘is the perfectly ordered and completely harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God, and of each other in God’ (ciu. 19.17: ordinatissima scilicet et concordissima societas fruendi deo et inuicem in de). Having not yet arrived at the latter, mankind is left to deal with the fallout of the former. This requires that the proud be constrained – though unfortunately, they are often the ones doing the constraining. 18 Ciu. 19.15: primi iusti pastores pecorum magis quam reges hominum constituti sunt. See also Augustine’s subsequent claim that man was not originally intended ‘to have dominion over any but irrational creatures (inrationabilibus)’: ‘dominetur’, inquit, ‘piscium maris et uolatilium caeli et omnium repentium, quae repunt super terram’. 19 Ibid.: illo pacis ordine, quo aliis alii subiecti sunt. 20 Ciu. 19.15. 21 Ciu. 19.14: sicut uir uxori, parentes filiis, domini seruis.

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political dominion unnatural, this is not exactly his point and cannot be, since he is about to deem servitude a post-lapsarian phenomenon. Instead, I will argue, it is the special concern that a paterfamilias has towards the members of his household which is prescribed by the order of nature. The order of nature, Augustine has just explained, dictates that there ought to be peace amongst all human beings. This, he goes on, is why God gave them two commandments: love God and love your neighbor. By following these commandments, human beings are brought back into proper relation with God and with one another, learning to have concern for their neighbor’s wellbeing and wishing their neighbor to have concern for theirs. Depicting peace amongst men (pace hominum) as a product of such right relation amongst persons, Augustine roots its ‘ordered harmony (ordinata concordia)’ in the ‘observance of two rules: first … do no harm’, and second, ‘help everyone whenever possible’.22 While demanding good will towards all, Augustine’s order of nature also subscribes to the principle of subsidiarity. That is, each person has a special responsibility towards his or her own (ei suorum). This, Augustine explains, is because ‘he [or she] has easier and more immediate contact with them’ (ad eos quippe habet oportuniorem facilioremque aditum consulendi).23 Yet, importantly, he adds that this is true ‘both in the order of nature and in the framework of human society (uel naturae ordine uel ipsius societatis humanae)’.24 This being the case, then, we cannot conclude that everything that follows in 19.14 is strictly based on the order of nature. Instead, the arrangement of the passage shows that Augustine is writing about the household as he knows it: in the framework of Roman society. Read in context, it is clear that the passage presents a model of domestic dominion redeemed, arguing that the exercise of fatherly imperium should be a form of service.25 The passage, in other words, is Augustine’s correction to the model offered by the domineering paterfamilias only two chapters before. Describing in 19.12 how that paterfamilias is ‘delighted’ to have his wife, children, and servants ‘obedient to his beck and call,’ and how he is ‘indignant’ when they are not, Augustine decries his libido dominandi.26 Enslaved in soul, the robber convinces himself that peace cannot exist unless all are subject to his will. To bring such peace about, ‘he employs 22 Ciu. 19.14: … id est ordinata concordia, cuius hic ordo est, primum ut nulli noceat, deinde ut etiam prosit cui potuerit. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 See J. Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics (1998), 39-40. 26 Ciu. 19.12: in domo autem sua cum uxore et cum filiis, et si quos alios illic habet, studet profecto esse pacatus; eis quippe ad nutum obtemperantibus sine dubio delectatur. nam si non fiat, indignatur corripit uindicat et domus suae pacem, si ita necesse sit, etiam saeuiendo componit, quam sentit esse non posse, nisi cuidam principio, quod ipse in domo sua est, cetera in eadem domestica societate subiecta sint. Note that the libido dominandi (literally, the lust for dominion) yields domination, as Augustine points out in Ciu. 12.8. In other words, it is a disordered love for ruling that results in perverse rule.

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savage measures’,27 imposing harsh punishments on all those who countermand his will. Effectively, he reigns as a tyrant. In De ciuitate Dei 19.14, then, Augustine is trying to show that domination (dominatio) is not the only way to rule.28 Upending the expectations laid in place by the earthly city, Augustine claims that true heads of household (iusti) ‘give orders’ (imperant), not out of pride or libido dominandi, ‘but from a dutiful concern for the interest of others’, such that they are, in reality, ‘the servants of those whom they appear to command’ (etiam qui imperant seruiunt eis, quibus uidentur imperare).29 Importantly, he is showing his readers how it is possible to participate in the social order without yielding to the ways of the earthly city. But, is he arguing that domestic dominion is prescribed by the order of nature? Spelling out his answer two chapters later, Augustine confirms that in accord with the order of nature that the paterfamilias be concerned with the eternal wellbeing of all in his household.30 The fact that he must give orders to them is not. Instead, Augustine considers imperium to be a burden: a ‘necessary duty’ (necessarium officium) brought about by the disorder of the world as we know it.31 Returning to the end of 19.14, then, we find that the relationships and roles wherein people express concern ‘for the interests of others’ are actually what Augustine is referring to at the opening of the subsequent chapter.32 For him, God’s providential plan puts human beings in relationship so that they can serve one another in amor Dei: this nexus of bonds constitutes the true order of nature. Accordingly, while Augustine might well see a natural stratification of agency within the family, such that the children naturally need looking after by their parents, and wives need looking after by their husbands because they are ‘the 27

Ciu. 19.12: see above. More often than not, dominatio carries with it a pejorative tone in ciu. Used when one political community crushes another, or a tyrannical leader dominates a people, in the early books on Roman history, it frequently evokes the libido dominandi or sometimes a synonym thereof, such as dominationis cupiditas. Significantly, the term is closely related to the participle Augustine uses to talk about demonic oppression, dominatus. 29 Ibid. 30 Ciu. 19.16. On this point, John Rist wonders if Augustine reads the duty to love one’s neighbor too restrictively. J. Rist, Augustine (1995), 239. It is true that Augustine does not flesh out the obligations one has to care for another’s bodily needs in ciu. and this is arguably a lack. Yet, for Augustine, love of neighbor is a fruit of love of God, such that, if a person were to love God rightly, she would know how to love her neighbor well – that is, as she loves herself. Of course, Augustine has many sermons that highlight the importance of giving alms, and the presence of Christ in the poor. See, for example, Sermones (ss.) 359A.11, 399.7, 345.2, 389.4, inter alia. 31 Ciu. 19.16: qui autem ueri patres familias sunt … desiderantes atque optantes uenire ad caelestem domum, ubi necessarium non sit officium imperandi mortalibus, quia necessarium non erit officium consulendi iam in illa inmortalitate felicibus. 32 Ciu. 19.14: imperant enim, qui consulunt; sicut uir uxori, parentes filiis, domini seruis. oboediunt autem quibus consulitur; sicut mulieres maritis, filii parentibus, serui dominis. 28

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inferior of the human pair’, he still does not think this necessitates dominion over the rational until sin enters the picture.33 Thus, in Augustine’s order of nature, there is no need for a total equality to avoid a situation of dominion; for him, every community is naturally made up of weaker and stronger members, and this is for the good. While we may disagree with him about the nature of the stratification that he sees amongst human beings, it is important to stress that his understanding of the order of nature is one that puts those with greater agency at the service of those with lesser without creating a situation of dominion. The order of nature yields an economy of service, but not naturally one of rule amongst rational creatures. Ultimately, the reason why dominion is only a post-lapsarian phenomenon is because it implies coercion, or a human person being made to do something regardless of, and potentially against, his or her own volition.34 With the alignment of all wills to God, the latter was an impossibility before the Fall, and the former was simply unfitting.35 Before the Fall, Augustine believes, all rational creatures adhered directly to God by their own volition.36 Because of this harmony amongst their wills, and the dignity they each had in being able to offer themselves to God, freely and fully, there was no need for the higher to rule the lower.37 Thus, while one can imagine direction or counsel occurring within 33 Ciu. 14.11: eoque per angelicam praesentiam praestantioremque naturam spiritali nequitia sibi subiecto et tamquam inferiori abutens fallacia sermocinatus est feminae, a parte scilicet inferior illius humanae copulae incipiens, ut gradatim perueniret ad totum, non existimans uirum facile credulum nec errando posse decipi, sed dum alieno cedit errori. 34 Katherine Chambers has argued that servitude, for Augustine, meant ‘to exist in a state of dependence on another’s will’, Katherine Chambers, ‘Slavery and Domination as Political Ideas in Augustine’s City of God’, Heythrop Journal 54 (2013), 13-38, 14. Her main thesis is that, against Petit and Skinner’s interpretation of Augustine’s views on slavery and what she calls domination, Augustine did not think the enslaved person was necessarily subject to arbitrary power, just another’s power per se. Though I do not agree with every aspect of her reading, her article contains a careful exegesis of Augustine’s treatment of women and slavery. 35 See ciu. 14.12 and 14.15 inter alia. 36 See ciu. 12.5-9, 14.10-1. 37 There is rule, generally speaking, within the order of nature – however, I am arguing, not amongst rational agents. Just as human beings naturally rule the beasts in Augustine, the mind naturally rules the body: this is according to the order of nature. Yet, it does not follow that interpersonal rule is according to the order of nature. While a case could be made for rule of children that have not reached the age of reason, I am skeptical that he regards women as so below rational capacity that they need ruling in the same way as the beasts or the body. Indeed, he often characterizes the subjection of Eve as a punishment for her sin. See, for example, ciu. 15.7 and De Genesi ad litteram (Gn. litt.) 11.37.50, where Augustine writes: ‘It was God’s sentence, you see, that gave this position to the man, and it was by her own fault that the woman deserved to have her husband as her lord, not by nature’, Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim (Gn. litt.), ed. J. Zycha, CSEL 28/1 (Tempsky, 1894): hoc enim uiro potius sententia dei detulit et maritum habere dominum meruit mulieris non natura, sed culpa. Notice that he does not describe this lordship as dominationem. Differentiating between the ‘kind of service, by which human beings later on began to be the slaves of other human beings’ and the kind of service that

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Augustine’s pre-lapsarian order, he never expressly discusses this. He simply makes it clear that dominion naturally belongs to God alone.38 The angels who continued in amor Dei, of course, remain in this original order, while the rational creatures who fell away from it became subject to the consequences of its loss. For human beings, this meant our subjection to sin and to one another. However, while all coercive institutions are post-lapsarian, they are not all sinful – that is, they are not necessarily ‘of’ the earthly city. Instead, Augustine thinks of coercion and punishment as necessary tools for maintaining social order in a fallen world and endorses them as such, both in De ciuitate Dei and elsewhere. Though Augustine does not theorize about what came first: domination as a political ailment, or dominion as a political remedy, it is clear that both are the consequences of the Fall. While, therefore, the political community and even the political project can properly be called natural, the coercive institutions with which moderns tend to associate politics are post-lapsarian, introduced as a way to approximate earthly peace in a fallen world. To put this another way, the political project is ontologically prior to both dominion and domination. However, given that earthly city has essentially effected a political coup, politics as we know it has always been marred by amor sui. While the coercive remedies that Augustine endorses mitigate the effects of amor sui amongst the ranks, some remain beyond its grasp. The lower, he laments in more than one letter, have a hard time bringing justice to bear on the higher.39 Dominion, in other words, does not solve the political problem of domination on its own. Ever a radical thinker, Augustine thinks that the only love bids by its very nature, he categorizes the kind of service that a wife must give her husband as the former, describing it as a matter of ‘social status (cuiusdam condicionis)’. Ibid. English translation taken from Augustine, On Genesis, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P., ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A. (Hyde Park, NY, 2002), 458. To me, this aligns the introduction of dominatio in the political world with its introduction in the home. Both are punishments for sin. Chambers reads this passage differently in ‘Slavery and Domination’ (2013), 16-7. Her take is that Eve’s servitude was natural, but only became a hardship after the Fall, while I think the servitude that is under dominion is a different sort of servitude than the kind that existed amongst rational creatures before the Fall. The latter is not tantamount to being ruled. 38 Ciu. 12.16. In Augustine’s description of pre-lapsarian life, God’s rule is not tantamount to coercion because Adam and Eve have good wills and naturally lived according to God’s will (ciu. 14.10-1). Nevertheless, God is sovereign. Augustine can argue this because he defines true freedom as the state one is in when one’s will is ‘not subservient to faults and sins’ (ciu. 14.11: arbitrium igitur uoluntatis tunc est uere liberum, cum uitiis peccatisque non seruit). That is, the rational creature’s freedom is in obedience to God (ciu. 14.12). For Augustine, this obedience is an act of love, made possible by God’s love working in us, even as it is also free. As he explains, if the pre-lapsarian will ‘had remained unshaken in its love of’ God, God, the immutable good, would have continued to ‘shed on it light to see and kindled in it fire to love’ (ciu. 14.13: si uoluntas in amore superioris inmutabilis boni, a quo inlustrabatur ut uideret et accendebatur ut amaret). The good will, in other words, is naturally sustained by God in its freedom. This freedom has been lost with the Fall, but Christ has the power to restore it in us. 39 See Augustine, epp. 9*.3-4153.25.

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solution for the problem of domination is one that gets at the root of the problem: one that targets amor sui. While we tend to think of radicality as that which is revolutionary – that which overthrows unjust structures – Augustine thinks that new versions will only grow back if the root of the problem is not faced. Some, of course, have argued that Augustine’s lack of interest in amending institutional structures derived from his sense that the hierarchies of the Roman world were fixed – a hierarchical world was all he had ever known and all he could imagine.40 There is a certain truth to this. Yet, what is also true is that Augustine primarily conceives of institutions as arrangements enshrined by human beings. In this way, it is first and foremost hearts that yield institutions and customs, even as institutions and customs also shape hearts. Because Augustine has this conviction, he thinks that there is no use in attacking unjust institutions as the source of the problem when the love animating human beings is the real issue.41 As long as human hearts are not fixed in amor Dei, injustice will arise in some form or another. This being so, Augustine presents the offices wielding coercive authority as both useful and necessary in the world as we know it, even as they are so frequently inhabited badly. Distinguishing between dominion and domination, he is able to show his readers that it is possible to serve others well through imperium by striving to bring healing to the wounded communities and persons they serve. In conclusion, to return to the questions raised at the beginning of this paper – To what extent does Augustine think about politics institutionally? Is his conception of political institutions proto-modern? Are political institutions natural, post-lapsarian, or purely sinful? – here I have argued that Augustine does not primarily think of politics in terms of institutions, but in terms of communities. These communities, which remain the focus of his thought, generate practices and social orders designed to help them in their pursuit of earthly peace. It is only in this context – of subjects initiating conventions in accord with or in opposition to the original meaning of creation – that Augustine is concerned with institutions. Nevertheless, if we shift focus to the order of nature and the order responding to the desert of sinners, Augustine’s treatment of what we think of as political institutions begins to emerge. This is his discussion of the post-lapsarian tools designed to approximate order in a fallen world. Augustine’s view of these institutions is prot-modern insofar as he views imperium, the power of coercive office, as a way of restraining human wickedness. Yet, he also views 40

J. Rist, Augustine (1995), 210. This is not to say that there is no use in attacking injustice, just that there is no use acting as if it were the source of the problem. There are many letters that document Augustine’s own attempt to remedy injustices, ep. 10* being a primary example. See Robert Dodaro, ‘Between Two Cities: Political Action in Augustine of Hippo’, in John Doody, Kevin Hughes and Kim Paffenroth (eds), Augustine and Politics (Lanham, MD, 2005), 99-116. 41

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dominium as a means of healing and serving others. This complicates the picture a bit. Finally, when it comes to the status of these coercive institutions, I have argued that they are decidedly post-lapsarian. This, however, does not mean that the offices themselves are sinfully undertaken – it is only the love of wielding their power that is. This suggests that there is a way of participating in the social order that resists participating in the economy of the earthly city. Thus, to reiterate, for Augustine, the political community is natural, dominion is postlapsarian, and domination is sinful.

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